The Trump campaign was the Wells Fargo of political fundraising, using deceptive practices to empty donors bank accounts. 1/ nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/…
Trump campaign changed the donor default to a recurring donation and made it difficult to understand.
Graph of refunds shows a campaign that made a deliberate decision to extract resources that donors did not want to give. Had to issue 530K refunds worth $64M. 2/
The Trump campaign boasted about their digital fundraising. Their secret sauce was changing donation defaults in opaque and deceptive ways.
As the Trump campaign became more desperate they resorted to more and more deceptive fine print to extract more resources from supporters. The evolution of check boxes from March to October.
It is easy to suggest that treating donors like creditors, investors or contractors you stiff payment on is pure Trumpism. But the GOP leadership has embraced WInRed, the company that employed the deceptive fundraising practices to rip off Republican donors.
Pretty obvious incentive problems here:
1/ For-profit company has big incentive to maximize volume of funds it raises
2/ Gets paid even when it takes money donors did not intend to give
3/ No offsetting incentive not to upset donors.
Good for WinRed, but seems bad for the GOP.
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