Not Even Professional Republicans Trust Trump And His Family When It Comes To Money

A new new poll from Quinnipiac shows the whole country is of one mind when it comes to the real Robert Mueller Report rather than William Barr's absurd press release. Now that Republicans have been lulled into believing the report exonerates Trump-- which it doesn't-- they join normal people in wanting to see it. 84% of Americans want to see it made public, while just 9% think it should stay sealed. Even 75% of Republicans want it publicly available, although 17% must have a feeling Barr's press release will be exposed as a fraud and they want the full report kept secret. (I wonder what percent of those 17% are, witting or unwitting, Russian moles.)

Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll: "We want to know more, say voters who have read the bullet points and believe the Mueller investigation was fair, but would like to read it in full." The same poll found Trump's job approval at 39% and his disapproval at 55%, about the same as early in March. By a margin of 72% to 21% voters agree that Trump would be a bad role model for their children. (Can you imagine who that 21% is?)

48% of voters believe Trump is mentally stable

Most voters do not trust Trump. And you know who else doesn't trust him? The Republican Party establishment's operatives don't trust him either-- and try to keep important data away from him and away from the grifter family members.Tom LoBianoco, reporting for Yahoo News about the latest attempt of the GOP to replicate the Democrats' hugely successful ActBlue: "The Republican Party’s efforts to build a small-dollar donation machine to keep up with the Democrats has hit a wall: a deep mistrust of President Trump and his campaign among Republican operatives." Hilarious, huh? But no stupid.

Some GOP operatives who would be the ones to purchase the tool don’t want Trump and his family raiding their campaign lists for their own benefit, said campaign consultants reached by Yahoo News.

“They’re scared of adopting it. Imagine Trump owning our data-- handing everything over to that guy, the guy who fucks with everybody, who has destroyed our party,” said a senior consultant for a conservative political group with national clients.

Republicans involved with the effort say there are no delays and everything is moving smoothly, and dismissed concerns about Trump stealing data as sour grapes from consultants who will lose money because they didn’t win the work on the project, now known as WINRED.

...Architects of the new project guaranteed that vendors data would be safe against intrusion or poaching by Trump and his campaign. “We’re an open book on what The Data Trust can and can’t do,” said Gerrit Lansing, one of the main architects of the new WINRED. “No one can get any donor data from Data Trust at anytime.”

The project recently changed its name from “Patriot Pass” to “WINRED,” after New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft called President Donald Trump and complained the project sounded like it was affiliated with his football team, according to a Republican familiar with the call from Kraft.

The fight over WINRED and online fundraising marks one of the last holdouts of the Republican establishment against Trump.

At the center of the problem is the very lifeblood of political operations-- donor lists and voter data. Campaign consultants, many of them former staff for the party’s major political committees and veterans of presidential bids, sell their services to candidates based on their success-- and their success is built on helping the candidates raise money and reach voters.

The Republican political ecosphere is filled with veterans of the Bush, McCain and Romney campaigns-- many of them still deeply distrusting of Trump. But the concerns extend to converts to Trump, including staunch conservatives, afraid that Trump’s main operatives will steal their business, because they would have backdoor access to their clients and donors via the new operation.

On the other side is a loose political collaboration formed by the Trump campaign, the RNC and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s top political aide, racing to plug a glaring hole in the Republicans’ operations heading into the 2020 elections.

WINRED was crafted to bring the GOP back up to speed in fundraising by merging the party’s voter data vault, the Data Trust, with an online payment system, Revv. WINRED is set to be the official online fundraising tool for the Trump reelection campaign, the RNC, the official campaign arms for House and Senate Republicans, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Campaign Committee.

But that doesn’t guarantee the vast ecosphere of Republican operatives and campaign consultants outside the official party committees will adopt the new tool for their candidates.

“It’s basically letting Trump sabotage our lists, and we know we can’t trust [Trump campaign manager] Brad Parscale. ... It would be stored in Data Trust-- which Brad has complete access to. ... He has every incentive to not protect our data,” said a senior campaign consultant.

In short, the problem is Trump. “If this was [conservative mega-donor] Sheldon Adelson starting this, I would have no problem with it,” said the consultant.

The RNC’s Data Trust forms the base of the WINRED system, a massive vault of information on voters and donors built in the wake of the 2012 loss by Mitt Romney. Revv would connect with the information in the Data Trust to form the payment processor for WINRED.

But the Republican political ecosphere is filled with large consulting firms who have built and maintained their own vaults of information about donors and voters. The consultants who raised concerns said they worried that they would have to provide access to those vaults to the Data Trust, thereby creating backdoor access to their information by Trump and his campaign.

...The term “small-dollar” is a bit of a misnomer because the fundraising from small donations has become massive in recent years. And it is also a lucrative business for the consultants who run the online payment processing systems.

ActBlue reaped $18.9 million in fees in the 2016 campaign cycle, according to FEC records. But that number catapulted in 2018, as ActBlue collected roughly $50 million in fees, according to the FEC.

Revv, founded by former RNC digital director Gerrit Lansing, did booming business with the Trump campaign in 2016. In just under six months running Trump’s online fundraising, Revv was paid close to $3 million by the Trump campaign, according to FEC reports.

The scrap over small-dollar fundraising is just one of many that the GOP has had to contend with as they gear up for the 2020 elections.

In the wake of the 2018 losses, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former Trump adviser David Bossie launched a whisper campaign to try to oust Trump campaign manager Parscale, according to Republicans familiar with the effort.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has been trying to snuff out the sparks of an insurgency before they can catch fire. Bossie met with Maryland Republicans earlier this month to try to quash a possible challenge by Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan. And party officials in South Carolina and Kansas have begun trying to axe their Republican primary contests altogether, an effort to protect Trump that critics have decried as frighteningly anti-democratic.

Yes, frighteningly anti-democratic-- like Cheri Bustos, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and the DCCC. The Democrats and Republicans are different on many policy matters-- like Choice and gays-- but when it comes to grotesque corruption and dysfunctional careerism, any prison for corrupt politicians would be overflowing with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. I hope it starts soon-- and that it's run by a private prison firm... because we all know how well they treat their charges.

In a Washington Post OpEd yesterday about Trump and the Mueller report, George Conway wrote that "If the charge were unfitness for office, the verdict would already be in: guilty beyond a reasonable doubt... On the facts, obstruction turns on what's in a defendant's mind-- often a difficult thing to determine, and especially difficult with a mind as twisted as Trump's. And complicating things even more, paradoxically, is the fact that some of Trump's arguably obstructionist conduct took place in full public view-- something that, with a normal person with normal moral inhibitions, would have indicated a lack of criminal intent. But in the head of Donald J. Trump, who knows?... [W]hether the Mueller report ever sees the light of day, there is one charge that can be resolved now. Americans should expect far more from a president than merely that he not be provably a criminal. They should expect a president to comport himself in accordance with the high duties of his office."

Who Will Pick The Democratic Presidential Nominee? You, That's Who

Kamala Harris by Nancy Ohanian

As we saw Saturday morning, Gillibrand has been sniffing around Wall Street for financing for her presidential campaign. But in Saturday morning Elena Schneider was reporting for Politico about another type of fundraising-- building a grassroots army of small donors instead of a few Wall Street fat cats. That's Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Beto, Cory Booker territory. Can you even imagine plutocrat Mike Bloomberg asking for small contributions? "Democratic presidential contenders," wrote Schneider, "are already locked in an important battle to showcase their viability, racing to build digital armies to power their campaigns. Online support is set to play a pivotal role in the Democratic primaries, after small-dollar donors using ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising platform, financed the Democratic House takeover-- and, before that, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ underdog 2016 presidential campaign. Potential candidates have spent months building up grassroots digital supporters to fund their campaigns in 2019 and build relationships with voters before they get the chance to go to the polls in 2020."

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand didn’t air a single TV ad in her campaign for reelection in New York last year, instead spending more than half her campaign budget with a firm specializing in digital fundraising. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) dropped over $1.2 million on Facebook ads targeting grassroots supporters nationwide since May 2018, the fifth-most of any Democrat-- even though Harris wasn’t running for anything last year. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) received donations from people in all 50 states within hours of announcing her presidential exploratory committee on Monday, she told reporters.

The small-dollar fundraising totals that candidates reap this year will be one of the few credible signs of momentum for candidates, months before primary votes are cast, in an era in which polls can bounce around wildly and media attention is split among dozens of candidates and a Twitter-happy president. Small contributions, most of which will come in online, will even be a benchmark for entrance into primary debates, the Democratic National Committee said last month.

Small-dollar fundraising totals will be “the new straw poll” in 2019, said Taryn Rosenkranz, a Democratic digital consultant. She added: “There are so many candidates running, all with similar policy platforms, meaning that small-dollar donations will be one of the best measures of a candidate’s strength for a year when we won’t have many concrete indicators.”

Already, five Democrats have set themselves apart as particularly high-powered digital fundraisers: Gillibrand, Harris, Sanders, Warren and-- ahead of the rest-- former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), whose $80 million 2018 Senate run broke fundraising records. All five received contributions from at least 200,000 unique online donors in 2017 and 2018, according to a Politico analysis of Federal Election Commission records filed by ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising platform. (O'Rourke's Senate campaign racked up over 700,000 unique donors via ActBlue.)

Gillibrand and Warren each raised over $10 million online while running in noncompetitive Senate races. While O’Rourke, Warren and Sanders-- whose 2016 presidential campaign raised nearly a quarter-billion dollars-- rose to national prominence with prodigious support from small donors, Harris and Gillibrand spent the past two years transforming their political operations so they are powered by online supporters, who provided the majority of their campaign committees’ funding in that period.

“Small-dollar donors are going to pick the Democratic nominee,” said Erin Hill, ActBlue’s executive director. Because of the “unprecedented volume” of online money expected to flow to Democrats in 2020, Hill said she expects ActBlue to double its staff of 100 over the next two years.

“We’ve already seen candidates announcing [their 2020 plans] directly to” online supporters, Hill said, citing Warren’s decision to announce her exploratory committee in an email to her list.

Another way to look at this race to break away from Wall Street and corporate donors has to do with connecting directly with voters through social media. Here are the likely candidates in order of their twitter followers. You'll notice that most of them have two verified accounts and it's likely that many people follow them in both accounts inflating the totals significantly.

• @BernieSanders- 8.95 million
@SenSanders- 8.03 million

• @SenWarren- 4.71 million
@ewarren- 2.18 million

• @CoryBooker- 4.09 million
@SenBooker- 127K

• @JoeBiden- 3.19 million

• @MarWilliamson- 2.6 million

• @KamalaHarris- 2.01 million
@SenKamalaHarris- 587K

• @MikeBloomberg- 2.28 million

• @SenGillibrand- 1.3 million
@GillibrandNY- 2,099

• @BetoORourke- 1.13 million
@RepBetoORourke- 243K

• @AmyKlobuchar- 541K
@SenAmyKlobuchar- 19.5K

• @EricHolder- 448K

• @RepSwalwell- 421K
@EricSwalwell- 24.2K

• @SenJeffMerkley- 418k
@JeffMerkley- 98.8K

• @SenSherrodBrown- 351k
@SherrodBrown- 48.3k

• @EricGarcetti- 289k
@MayorOfLA- 285K

• @TulsiGabbard- 217K
@TulsiPress- 111K

• @TomSteyer- 212K

• @SecretaryCastro- 171K
@JulianCastro- 137K

• @GovInslee- 156K
@JayInslee- 23.6K

• @HickForCo- 124k
@GovOfCO- 15.2k

• @PeteButtigieg- 81.6K

• @TerryMcAuliffe- 64.3K

• @VoteOjeda2020- 44K

• @RepJohnDelaney- 20.2K
@JohnK Delaney- 12K (Delaney For President 2020)

• @HowardSchultz- 2,728
@DraftSchultz- 43 followers (Ready for Schultz 2020)- 43 Starbucks baristas autitioning for store manager positions

Who Got The Small Dollar Contributions Last Year? Bernie By A Landslide

Remember to multiply each dollar amount by 25.32

This is a note I got today from a Member of Congress who is very active on the issues surrounding campaign finance reform, how plutocrats buy influence over politicians and what we can do to stop that:

Dear Howie:

ActBlue charges 3.95% for contributions. They have now posted their top "contributors" to their "technical services" in 2016, meaning their take on contributions at their website. This tells us who raised how much on ActBlue in 2016, by multiplying these numbers by 25.32:

https://www.opensecrets.org/527s/527cmtedetail_contribs.php?ein=270160261&cycle=2016

In terms of small donors on ActBlue, Bernie outraised the entire Democratic Party by 4 to 1. "End Citizens United" outraised the other "liberal" groups combined.

Sincerely…

Before publishing, I decided to check that out with a very reliable source at ActBlue itself, someone absolutely in a position to know:

Hey Howie—

Because ActBlue is a conduit, we file our own FEC reports and file every contribution in and back out. It’s a lot of data but it’s the most accurate. If you’re looking for data, I’d point you there.

Open Secrets doesn’t pull from our reports but from the filed reports that candidates and committees file. They do need to report the processing fees that we collect so the numbers are usually in the right ballpark but can be messed up if a candidate makes a mistake on their filing, etc.

If what you’re trying to figure out is how much Bernie raised, we don’t talk about candidate and committee numbers as a policy. But Bernie’s presidential committee publicly reported about $225 million being raised and he also was very public about nearly all of that coming via ActBlue in $27 chunks. It is true that he holds the title for being the biggest committee through ActBlue so far.

Not every committee uses ActBlue or small dollar donors for all their fundraising, so any numbers you’re pulling from us only relate to ActBlue and might not tell the whole fundraising story. If you’re looking for holistic campaign finance numbers, I’ll always suggest the FEC database as your best bet.

Good luck!

Sometimes There Are Ways To Vet A Candidate Without Asking If They Support Medicare-For-All

There's a progressive organization this cycle that was-- they are no longer-- forcing candidates to sign a contract that stipulated, among other things, that the candidate would instruct ActBlue to send all their contributions not to the candidate's own bank account but to the organization's bank account. The organization would keep 95% of the funds and send 5% to the candidate. Eventually the candidates said, collectively, "Duh! This isn't fair"-- and forced the organization to change the deal. The new deal left the organization with 65% and the candidates with 35%. In return for the 95% or 65% the organization was supposed to run the candidate's campaign. The candidates I discussed it with said they did virtually nothing of value at all.

They sounded like scam artists you would expect from religious right hucksters or from Republicans, maybe from EMILY's List, but not from progressive Democrats. Eventually I spoke to the guy who founded the organization and he said they weren't scam artists and, in any case, they had stopped ripping off the candidates. But while they still were it was a convenient way for me to look at artists and say no one stupid enough to read that contract and sign it would make a good member of Congress. A handy tool for vetting, right?

Another handy tool has to do with ActBlue itself. ActBlue started around the same time Blue America did. Tact Blue's function is to provide the infrastructure for candidates and groups like Blue America to raise funds for candidates. They're facilitated the raising of $1.89 BILLION for Democratic candidates and organizations.

Almost all candidates start out as novices. They hire consultants and staffers who are supposed to know something that will help them get elected. Another vetting tool we use is whether or not they can figure out how to use ActBlue. If they can't figure out how to use ActBlue, they;'re not going to be able to figure out how to get from their office to their seat in Congress. And we tell 'em-- register with ActBlue. "My campaign manager," I occasionally hear, "wants to use another service instead," Depending on my mood, I may tell them they have the wrong campaign manager and they have no chance to win if they keep him. More often I just say something to the effect, you can keep working with whoever your campaign manager wants to work with but if you don't also use ActBlue, many grassroots donors won't contribute to your campaign, because they trust ActBlue to not be a scam operation and they don't really know about the others who are trying to replicate what ActBlue does. But they're not ActBlue. ActBlue does not charge a fee. Legally they are required by the FEC to pass along a flat rate of 3.95% on each donation to cover credit card and bank processing cost. If they didn't pass that along it would be an in-kind donation. It's the only expense candidates ever incur working with ActBlue. No one is asked to sign a contract and, better yet, local school committee candidates use the same tools that Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama did. Their main source of income is from the small tips that donors can optionally leave when they make a contribution.

In the words of ActBlue's executive director, Erin Hill, "ActBlue is a nonprofit dedicated to building fundraising technology for Democratic campaigns, committees, and organizations. We believe that grassroots, people-powered campaigns are what we need for the future. That 1- raises more money; 2- connects campaigns with the folks they represent; and 3- provides a path for new voices to organize and build competitive campaigns." She issued this statement after the big wins Tuesday night.

All year, grassroots donors have been leading the Democratic Party by participating in special elections in unprecedented numbers, funding new groups that fight back in innovative ways, and expanding the map of candidates running for office. Small-dollar donors funded races in districts where Democrats haven’t contested for years. They also funded races where first-time candidates with diverse perspectives will now be setting policy as elected officials. Small-dollar donors fueled last night’s historic wins across the country.

For example, we were thrilled to see Democrats win big up and down the ballot in Virginia last night. Every Democrat who won in that state was an ActBlue user. It was truly a testament to the hard work of grassroots supporters who made over 220,000 donations on ActBlue this year to 335 candidates and groups at the state and local level in Virginia for this election. These extraordinary numbers are just a snapshot of the incredible energy we've seen sitewide this year, with small-dollar donors raising $413 million for 6,985 candidates and organizations from 13.5 million contributions in 2017 alone.