Is There Any Way to Tell Which Political Fundraising Texts Are Legit?

Text-message canvassers come in three flavors: mainstream groups, questionable but still legal PACs, and outright scams.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a rally in Tempe, Arizona. (Gage Skidmore)
By Marty Smith

I receive a ton of Democratic Party-adjacent fundraising texts. I’m pretty sure a lot of them are scams, but I still feel a pang of guilt responding to progressive heroes like Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren with a bitchy “UNSUBSCRIBE.” Is there any way to tell which ones are legit and which I can nuke with a clear conscience? —Brisket Queen

I used to worry about turning into a Republican. You reach a certain age, your prostate swells beyond some predetermined limit, and suddenly you find yourself with your belt up by your nipples thinking, “Man, this Bill Kristol guy is making a lot of sense.” Fortunately, making sense of the current GOP would require a prostate larger than the observable universe, so I’m still Team Blue—which means I feel your pain.

Text-message canvassers come in three flavors: mainstream groups, questionable but still legal PACs, and outright scams. The mainstream appeals usually come from a candidate’s official campaign or from an organization you’ve heard of—the DCCC, the ACLU, et al. The links usually direct you to a known donation platform, like ActBlue.org, or to the candidate’s website.

The middle tier is murkier: They’re real, registered PACs, but they may use most of your contribution to pay their own salaries and overhead, with not much left over for actual campaigns. OpenSecrets.org maintains a good PAC database if you want to see how a given group spends their (your) money.

Finally, there are the straight-up ripoffs. There’s no actual group, they’re not even listed at OpenSecrets, and they drop the names of your progressive heroes without permission. They may even pretend to be affiliated with one of the A-list groups. How can you tell they aren’t? Look at the domain name in the link (everything before the first slash). If the URL is something like “ACLU.org/give,” that’s a good sign. If it’s “jeffsACLU8z.me/ACLU,” not so much.

You can also google “WHOIS lookup” and use one of the results to find details about the domain in question. I recently used this to trace a pitch from “stop-chaos.org” to a name-withheld registrant with an address in Reykjavik, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

If you really want to help your idols, your best bet is to contact them directly through their websites. Those texts on your phone? In the words of the right-winger I didn’t become: Kill ’em all; let God sort ’em out.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.

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