These are the kinds of emails Mothership is excited to push past Gmail's spam filter: "Trump slashes $460/month from your Social Security check?!" or a $1,400 "stimulus check" the recipient is missing. Click through and you end up at an ActBlue page with recurring payments pre-checked.

Mothership Strategies is pitching Google's new policy allowing PACs to bypass Gmail spam filters as a "HUGE opportunity." They are promising qualifying clients "guaranteed placement in Gmail inboxes" and predicting "massive spikes in email fundraising."

Tactic 6: Match multipliers.

Tactic 5: Fabricated account status. Official-looking notices about records and profiles.

Tactic 4: Singling out. Isolate the target and imply everyone else has already complied.

Tactic 3: Fear. Frighten seniors about the benefits they depend on, then offer a donation as the fix.

Tactic 2: Guilt. Scold the recipient for not responding, imply they're letting people down.

Tactic 1: Manufactured urgency. Deadlines and countdown pressure.

This isn't just a story about rogue spam PACs and fundraising firms like PTP and Mothership that the party hasn't reined in. There's a cottage industry of spam vendors, and the DCCC/DSCC's fundraising bears the hallmarks of elder financial exploitation, just toned down. Side-by-side comparison 👇🧵

His #1 near-term recommendation: convene committee leaders and use the DNC's authority to draft a fundraising code of conduct for candidates and committees. Not in the DNC release.

Last year I was interviewed by Paul Rivera for the DNC's after-action review. He told me then that fundraising reform would likely meet the greatest resistance from the party and its operatives. A passage (highlighted) Rivera says was sent but left out of the report the DNC released: 🧵

I cross-referenced my database of candidates against credible voter fraud cases. GOP politicians are implicated at 50x–38,000x the general public's rate. Yet even if every American voted with the integrity of a GOP candidate, it still wouldn't come close to justifying making voting one iota harder.

If there’s an issue Democrats could run on and win in a landslide, it’s anti-corruption. But first the Dem establishment needs to deal with its own corruption problem. It’s not enough to be right about Trump’s corruption—they also have to be credible.

This list of what the public finds corrupt is basically a rundown of Trump’s governing philosophy. Poll: @brennancenter.org

Nation relieved as Supreme Court rules 6-3 that water is still wet in 194 page opinion.

Usually these political corruption maps have complicated plumbing. You know it’s bad when it’s just a closed loop that looks like an inbred family tree.

A friendly empirical note for those losing it over progressive primary wins: ideological positioning barely explains Democratic vote shares since 2006. Turnout explains a lot. The party can run to the center all it wants. It won’t help if the base doesn’t show up.

Musk's $1.32 trillion, one pixel = $1,000, now in motion and sped up so you don't have to scroll for 20 minutes to reach the end. See the full web version (now with autoscroll): stanford.edu/~bonica/weal...

Talarico calling Paxton "the most corrupt politician in America" is a great start. His challenge won't be distancing himself from the base's support for trans rights, which he shares. It'll be distancing himself from the establishment's reluctance to address corruption, which he doesn't.

He’s going to be deeply disappointed when he gets around to reading some of his colleagues’ dissenting opinions.

To understand what the Supreme Court is doing, you have to recognize that this is how authoritarians in Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela consolidated power. Scholars call it autocratic legalism. The Court isn’t complicit. It’s an active participant. Roberts is following a script.

Truth is, Orbán is just the latest in long list of authoritarians to be defeated by anti-corruption politics. A Democratic landslide is possible if they can credibly take up the anti-corruption mantle. But that can’t happen if voters see them as corrupt and beholden to wealthy donors.

Another Trump-endorsed foreign party cruising toward electoral disaster. If Magyar’s Tisza lead holds, Orbán will become the latest authoritarian taken down by an anti-corruption movement. What authoritarians fear most is an opposition with hands clean enough to credibly promise to clean house.

@katmabu.bsky.social narrowly lost the IL-09 primary last night. But here's a number worth sitting with. Her campaign brought in more first-time Gen Z donors than Jeffries, Schumer, the DSCC, and the DCCC, and her primary opponents combined. This is why campaigns like hers matter.

1/ I recently wrote about Frances Perkins—FDR’s Labor Secretary and first woman cabinet member. She is best known as the architect of the New Deal but she had a lesser-known achievement: She dismantled her era’s version of ICE.🧵

Institutions and justice: 51 million more Americans voting. Elections would cost $14.9 billion less per cycle. Our elected leaders would be 12 years younger. 60 more women in Congress. 1.4 million fewer Americans would be behind bars. Per capita carbon emissions would be cut nearly in half.

Survival and safety: Americans would live 4 years longer. 10,000 fewer babies would die each year from reduced infant mortality rates. Maternal deaths would drop by three-quarters. 85,000 fewer people would die from opioid overdoses.

Family and work: Parents would get 25 weeks of paid parental leave. Workers would get 27 days of guaranteed paid time off per year. We'd work 231 fewer hours per year—nearly six fewer weeks. Net childcare costs would fall by 60%.

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this: America's problems are solved problems. Just not here. What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

There are so many parallels with Nazi propaganda that there is no way they don’t know what they’re doing.