Hi, welcome to "Full Frontal."
I'm Samantha Bee.
Guess what?
It's campaign season again.
As the midterms get closer, campaign emails
are filling our inboxes.
And while many of them seem about
as trustworthy as the spam you get for discount boner pills,
candidates are sending you all these messages
for one unfortunate reason.
They work, unlike those pills.
I want my $7 back, bonerdonor@hardnards.69.
Americans spent more than $14 billion on the 2020 election,
with 23% coming from small donors.
So politicians will do whatever they can to get your money,
even if that means taking more than donors intended
and leaving them broke.
A recent study found that 99% of fundraising emails
use manipulative tactics.
The other 1% just say, give me your money, you son of a bitch!
One tactic you may have noticed is vague subject lines
to get you to open the message, like Adam Schiff saying
"hey" or Bernie Sanders actually emailing
people with the subject line "salivating."
You have to click to find out whether Bernie is sexting
you, or just thinking about soup,
or God forbid, both at the same time.
When being coy and mysterious doesn't work,
campaigns will use breathless exaggerations
to get you to click, from Republicans warning they'll
lose the House for good if you don't donate $9 by midnight
to Nancy Pelosi's more succinct sales pitch, donate today,
or God will commit suicide.
Some campaign emails even imitate
official looking correspondence or overdue bill notices.
But as bad as those deceptive tactics are,
a "New York Times" investigation showed
that Trump and the Republicans have taken them to a new level.
Throughout 2020, many Trump supporters thought they were
making a one-time donation to the Trump campaign only to find
out later that their bank accounts
were being repeatedly drained.
SHEPHARD SMITH: If supporters did not uncheck these boxes,
they found themselves paying recurring
donations every month, or even every week.
They also added a second pre-check
box that automatically doubled a donor's contribution.
RACHEL MADDOW: If you uncheck this box,
we will have to tell Trump you're a defector.
It may be immoral, but it appears to be legal.
Can we just put that on the flag already?
Trump was able to do all his scamming with the help
of WinRed, the right-wing fundraising platform that
processes his online donations.
WinRed takes a chunk of every donation, which
is a massive amount of money considering
it's processed $1.2 billion for Trump and his party.
While they ultimately had to refund 10% of those donations,
WinRed even made money from those refunds.
But we probably shouldn't be surprised
by their predatory tactics since WinRed sounds
like a 1950s tobacco brand whose target
market was pregnant women.
Of course, predatory political emails
aren't just a Republican thing.
Some Democratic organizations have used these tactics too.
But don't worry, in true Democratic tradition,
we kind of suck at it.
Democrats use these same sorts of programs,
but not to the extent of how the Trump campaign managed this.
Democratic governor Gavin Newsom's campaign website also
had the same pre-checked box in place earlier this
month until it was removed.
Why is it the only thing both parties can agree on is that
politicians should be allowed to e-milk voters until
them utters are dry as a bone?
Like Republicans, Democrats have used
pre-checked, recurring donation boxes, non-existent deadlines,
and all sorts of misleading content and design tactics
in their emails.
I mean, we should have seen it coming.
Nobody has more graphic design majors than the left.
But before we both sides this issue,
let's acknowledge that Democrats at least have some shame
about fleecing their voters.
While most Republican groups use pre-checked recurring donation
boxes, ActBlue, the Democratic counterpart to WinRed,
has moved to block them entirely.
In Democratic circles, a debate raged about the ethics
of online solicitations, especially
about Beto O'Rourke, who pre-checked the question,
do you like me?
Yes or no?
Meanwhile, on the right, there's been
virtually no attempt to change predatory email practices.
And speaking of the Republican Party--
old people.
Even outside the political sphere,
those living out their golden years
are gold mines for shady moneymaking schemes.
REPORTER: Older Americans are particularly
at risk for this type of fraud.
According to the FBI, more than 100,000 people aged 60 and over
reported being scammed last year.
Older adults hold the majority of wealth in the United States,
and the criminals know that.
That Is disgusting.
If you're going to go after an elderly person's money,
do it the right way.
Manipulate them into leaving you everything in their will.
Older people are the perfect target for nefarious campaign
fundraising thanks largely to their increased
likelihood of cognitive impairment and low rates
of digital literacy.
Republican and Democratic campaigns
target them with subject lines like "Social Security," which
is like sending a cat an email with the subject
line "laser pointer."
Campaigns also spend disproportionately
on ads for older audiences, which explains
the countless shirtless Sam Waterston
ads your grandmother gets.
Unfortunately, when you combine a ruthless moneymaking
operation and vulnerable elderly people,
the results are all too predictable.
While in hospice care, Blatt gave $500,
half of his monthly income.
Over the next month, Trump's campaign
tapped Blatt's bank account six more times, taking
the dying man's last $3,000.
"Bandits" is what 78-year-old Victor Amelino called "The
Times" when he realized that he'd paid
almost $8,000 to the Trump campaign without realizing it.
I'm retired, he said.
I can't afford to pay all that damn money.
RACHEL MADDOW: An 87-year-old in Illinois who made a, quote,
"series of small contributions" to Trump
last fall that he thought would add up to about $200--
the Trump fundraising operation had actually
withdrawn roughly $2,300.
This is literally the only Rachel
Maddow clip your grandparents will
ever be glad you emailed them.
It's hard to be shocked by the Republicans'
fondness for these scams.
If it were up to them, all ballots would come
with Trump's name pre-checked.
But we don't have to resign ourselves to the status quo.
There are some efforts to change things for the better.
Senate Democrats are pushing a ban
on a controversial fundraising tactic
after Trump supporters claim they
were duped into contributing a lot
more money than they intended.
REPORTER: Today the Federal Election Commission moved
towards cracking down on this predatory behavior,
voting unanimously to recommend that Congress ban
campaigns from guiding donors into these kinds
of recurring donations.
This was a unanimous bipartisan vote of 6-0.
Half of the commission is made up of Republicans.
Yes, there's no one more brave and principled
than Republicans who aren't elected by their lunatic base.
We should also be cracking down on micro-targeting.
In the olden days, way back when the internet
was still in black and white, most people
saw the same political ads.
But micro-targeting allows campaigns to pinpoint
super specific groups, allowing the craziest, most
manipulative ads to stay under the radar
and avoid accountability.
Of course, companies like Facebook
knew micro-targeting could be exploited by politicians
to target vulnerable users, but they decided to take that risk.
As the old saying goes, you can't
make an omelet, or a profit, without breaking
a few eggs, or democracies.
We're living in an era of bullshit
when nobody knows what to believe anymore.
We can't even tell reality from cake.
And politicians are capitalizing on that confusion.
If we want to reduce ad money's influence in politics,
we have to demand that from our lawmakers.
And if they won't listen, we have
to elect new lawmakers, which requires raising millions
of dollars, which requires sending out
a shit ton of fundraising ads.
In short, America is doomed because advertising
is a cancer on democracy.
We'll be right back after these commercial messages.
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