Democratic fundraising groups push back against study exposing senior donor exploitation

Adam Bonica combined Federal Elections Commission contribution records with Meta’s advertising library to reveal that Democratic-affiliated “spam PACs” direct 70-85 percent of their ad impressions to users aged 65 and older, even though this group makes up only 14 percent of adult Meta users in the United States. Cross-referencing with the L2 voter file, he identified roughly 138,000 donors averaging 75 years old who have each given to these PACs at least one hundred times, accounting for nearly half of the $1.4 billion raised since 2017.

Bonica argues that the fundraising messages employ urgency, guilt and false claims that mirror patterns of elder financial abuse. An attempt by one outlet opinion section to publish the study was met with cease-and-desist letters from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and the paper later cancelled the story, calling it “too investigative.” Additional legal pressure from Mothership Strategies, a leading firm in the spam-PAC network, further stymied publication, forcing Bonica to release the work on Substack. The episode highlights the party’s resistance to scrutiny of its fundraising practices and raises concerns about the exploitation of senior donors.