I’ve spent my career as a political scientist learning why moments like that almost never happen. And why, sometimes, they do.

On a Saturday afternoon in March 1911, Frances Perkins was having tea near Washington Square when she heard screams. She ran toward the smoke rising from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and arrived in time to watch 146 workers—mostly young immigrant women—burn to death or leap from ninth-floor windows. The doors had been locked to prevent theft. The fire escapes collapsed. The city’s tallest ladders reached only the sixth floor.

She witnessed it all. She later called it “the day the New Deal was born.”

Perkins understood that the fire was a policy outcome. Every death had been produced by specific legal choices—the absence of fire codes, the permissibility of locked exits, the treatment of workers as inputs rather than persons. The horror of that day was not that the system failed. It was that it was functioning exactly as designed.

I keep a dataset of cross-national comparisons. The OECD—the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—tracks outcomes across thirty-one wealthy democracies. These are our peers. On metric after metric, the United States stands apart from them. American exceptionalism is real, but not in ways worth celebrating.

Start with work and economic life. Americans work longer hours, pay more out-of-pocket for college and childcare, lack parental leave, and enjoy less economic mobility. The share of income going to the top 1 percent is nearly double the OECD average. American CEOs earn, on average, 354 times as much as their workers. More workers are trapped in poverty-wage jobs. Collective bargaining covers fewer workers. And social protections are less generous for those who fall on hard times, with the government raising less in taxes and spending more on the military.

The economy is just the beginning.

We spend nearly twice as much on healthcare as other wealthy countries do. Yet life expectancy is well below average, infant and maternal mortality rates are alarmingly high, and more Americans remain uninsured.

We suffer from overlapping public health crises—the highest rates of teenage births, drug overdoses, obesity, and gun deaths among peer nations.

We have more lawyers per capita and the world’s most profitable legal services industry. Yet we rank 101 out of 114 countries—behind Afghanistan—in ordinary citizens’ ability to access and afford legal services. The average American is outmatched by wealthy interests who can purchase the representation that justice supposedly guarantees.

Our criminal justice system is discriminatory and excessively punitive, with an incarceration rate five times the OECD average. Yet it can seem easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than to send a wealthy American to prison.

These outcomes flow from a political system designed to suppress participation and amplify affluent voices. Americans express similar interest in politics as citizens of other democracies. Yet our turnout remains depressed through deliberate barriers—voter ID laws, purged rolls, Election Day on a workday, gerrymandered districts.

Our society generates enormous prosperity while deliberately withholding it from those who need it most. That is the American exception.

A reasonable person might conclude that the American project is in terminal decline. But the same numbers that document the dysfunction point toward a different, more optimistic conclusion.

America’s problems are solved problems.

Universal healthcare is not some utopian fantasy. It is Tuesday in Toronto. Affordable higher education is not an impossible dream. It is Wednesday in Berlin. Sensible gun regulation is not a violation of natural law. It is Thursday in London. Paid parental leave is not radical. It is Friday in Tallinn, and Monday in Tokyo, and every day in between.

There is another America inside this one, visible in the statistics of nations that made different choices. Call it Latent America: the nation that would exist if our democracy functioned to serve the public rather than protect the already powerful.

To see this, you need only compare outcomes in the US with its peers. The graphic below illustrates a simple thought experiment: What would happen if the United States simply matched the average performance of our 31 peer nations in the OECD? We don’t need to become a shining city on a hill to transform Americans’ lives. We just need to become average.

Perkins saw what this country wasn’t but could be. After the fire, she did not wait. She dragged legislators through factories and sweatshops until they saw what she had seen. She worked alongside organizers like Rose Schneiderman who understood that reforms don’t happen unless workers were organized enough to demand them. Frederick Douglass put it plainly: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

By 1914, New York had passed dozens of new labor laws—fire codes, limits on hours, restrictions on child labor. Perkins achieved this before she could vote for the legislators who enacted them.

Over the next two decades, she kept building. As Industrial Commissioner, she made New York the proving ground: minimum wages, unemployment insurance, workplace safety. The policies dismissed as radical in Washington became ordinary in Albany.

When Roosevelt named her Secretary of Labor in 1933, she walked into his office with a list: a 40-hour work week, a federal minimum wage, unemployment insurance, abolition of child labor, workplace safety protections, social security. “Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before,” she told him. “You know that, don’t you?” She had the blueprints in hand—and she made clear she would not take the job unless he was prepared to build from them.

I know how this moment feels. I watch the dismantling too—the corruption displayed without shame, the institutions hollowed from within, the coordinated campaigns of cruelty and dehumanization. It is easy to believe we are watching an ending.

But scholars who study democratic collapse see it differently. “The United States is in a very good place to resist,” Steven Levitsky said recently. “There is a very high likelihood that Trump will fail.”

The regime dismantling our institutions does not command majority support. It never has. Trump’s approval ratings have remained underwater throughout his presidency. The policies being enacted poll badly, often catastrophically. This is not a popular revolution. It is a minoritarian project exploiting a counter-majoritarian system—and regimes built that way are inherently unstable.

The corruption is no longer hidden. Trump accepts $400 million planes from foreign governments while making billions from crypto schemes. Cabinet positions go to mega-donors. Supreme Court justices vacation with billionaires who have cases before the court. This nakedness is not strength but a vulnerability borne of arrogance. Corruption has been the grievance that unites disparate opposition and sweeps strongmen from power. Hidden corruption persists because it is difficult to mobilize against. Exposed corruption shifts the axis of politics from left versus right to clean versus corrupt, people versus oligarchs. That’s a fight authoritarians lose.

And then there are the generations now rising. They are less credulous, more pragmatic, less patient with institutions that fail to deliver. They want specific reforms addressing problems they can name.

The old playbook was caution: promise little, deliver less, call it pragmatism. A new cohort of leaders is done with that. You can hear it in how they speak. When Zohran Mamdani was inaugurated as mayor of New York City, he promised to govern audaciously. “We may not always succeed,” he said, “but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.”

Political pragmatism is not about fighting only the battles you expect to win. It is the refusal to let probable failure dictate what you attempt. This is the Perkins disposition. She did not know the Depression would come. She did not know Roosevelt would call. She prepared anyway, because preparation is itself a form of politics—a way of insisting that the world you are ready for is a world that could exist.

My deepest fear is not that we fail to survive this moment—it’s that we survive it only to return to the status quo that made it possible. That we exhale, declare victory, and leave in place the Electoral College, the filibuster, the gerrymandered maps, the money-soaked elections that allowed a minoritarian movement to capture the state in the first place. The point is not to get back to normal. Normal is how we got here.

The wall looks permanent until the day it comes down. So it goes with all institutions. They are not immutable fixtures but human creations, designed to solve the problems of one era and replaceable when they fail the next.

This is my last column before parental leave.

My wife and I will soon welcome our first child. I’ve been thinking about what it means to bring a new person into a country whose vital signs look like ours—the falling life expectancy, the missing safety net, the captured political system. And I keep coming back to Frances Perkins watching the fire.

Having a child is an act of radical optimism—a bet that the future will be worth living in, a refusal to accept that the world as it is represents the world as it must be.

I watched the Berlin Wall fall when I was six. No analyst predicted it would end the way it did—suddenly, peacefully, crowds streaming through checkpoints sealed for decades. Perkins spent twenty-two years preparing for a moment she couldn’t know would come. It came.

Those who say these problems can’t be solved are really saying they can’t be solved here—confessing a belief that Americans are uniquely incapable of what dozens of other democracies have achieved.

Despair makes sense when nothing can be done. We know exactly what can be done. We can see it working.

The work now is the same as it was in 1911: document the failures, design the remedies, prepare for the moment.

The America described above is not some utopian dream. It is a set of solutions waiting to be implemented. And soon there will be one more American worth building it for.

When Trump posted yet again this week that windmills are “killing all our beautiful bald eagles”—accompanied by an image that turned out to be a falcon in Israel—it was hard not to think of Don Quixote.

We use “tilting at windmills” casually to mean fighting imaginary enemies. But Cervantes had something more specific in mind.

Don Quixote is about a man who can’t accept the modern world as it is, so he recasts it as something he can heroically fight against. In the famous scene, Quixote sees windmills. His companion and squire Sancho says, “Those are just windmills.” Quixote insists they’re evil giants—monsters—in disguise.

Quixote isn’t hallucinating. He sees exactly what Sancho sees. He just claims to know what’s really going on underneath. Sound familiar?

One common interpretation is that Cervantes chose windmills deliberately. In early 17th-century Spain, windmills were new technology—modern infrastructure spreading across La Mancha, changing the landscape and the economy. They represented progress. And Quixote, trapped in his fantasy of a glorious past, couldn’t accept them as mere machines. They had to be monsters.

This is the deeper meaning that gets lost when we reduce the phrase to “fighting imaginary battles.” Quixote isn’t imagining things that aren’t there. He’s refusing to accept what they are. The windmill is real. The monster is the fiction he needs to justify his war against a world that has moved on without him.

Trump follows the same bizarre logic. You can’t wage a heroic war against a power grid, so he invents a villain. Wind turbines don’t just generate power; they cause cancer. He transforms boring infrastructure into a sinister enemy he can fight.

I’ve been tracking Trump’s statements about windmills for a while now, and after the falcon-eagle post I decided to run the numbers. His attacks on wind energy go back to 2012—when he first fought an offshore wind farm near his Scottish golf resort. Over the following 13 years, Trump has clocked over 50 documented attacks, with a sharp spike in 2025.

The ways he vilifies windmills are deeply weird. “Stupid.” “Ugly.” “Junk.” “Hoax.” “Killing field.” “Bird cemetery.” And yes—“monstrous” and “monstrosities.” Almost as if he were mimicking Quixote. In his telling, they kill eagles, cause cancer, ruin communities, destroy countries, murder whales. None of it holds up to scrutiny. None of that matters.

In the novel, Quixote charges at the windmills. Reality hits back. He’s thrown from his horse and badly hurt. Does he rethink his beliefs? No. He says an enchanter must have turned the giants into windmills at the last second to steal his victory.

In 2020, Trump’s own aides told him plainly: you lost the election. “Those are just windmills.” Trump couldn’t accept it. So he sent Rudy Giuliani to Four Seasons Total Landscaping to declare that dark forces had conjured his win into a loss at the last moment.

Once you adopt that logic, no evidence can change your mind—it only proves the conspiracy runs deeper. Facts become proof of the plot. The unfalsifiable worldview locks into place. Five years later, he’s still charging.

False beliefs aren’t harmless when they motivate action. They cause real damage while solving nothing. The monsters were never real. The wreckage is.

Turning progress into an enemy doesn’t stop it. It just makes it more painful. The windmills kept turning in La Mancha. They’ll keep turning here.

Cervantes wrote Don Quixote as satire four centuries ago. We’re still watching a confidently wrong man—whose willful subordination of truth to his ego is mistaken for delusion—charge at windmills because he can’t accept progress.

Despite everything going on around us, I remain fundamentally optimistic about American democracy and the prospects for meaningful reform. In the first half of 2025, I focused on using data to document the rise of authoritarianism and its parallels to what we’ve seen in other countries. In the second half, I turned toward opportunities for reform. This little Substack has had real impact this year—shaping narratives and providing empirical support for reform-minded people and groups.

I am grateful to be part of a growing community committed to building a better democracy. Your engagement—reading, sharing, pushing back, offering tips—has made this work sharper and more useful. I don’t take that for granted.

This year-end roundup covers the systematic targeting of institutions, the parasitic mechanics of political money, and the data-driven case for long-term hope.

1. Spam PACs and The Fundraising-Industrial Complex

This year, I traced the money flowing through the Democratic fundraising apparatus and found a system consuming itself. My investigation focused on the “fundraising-industrial complex”—a parasitic ecosystem where raising money has become the primary activity of politics, rather than a means to an end.

In August, I traced the money flowing through Mothership Strategies, a firm founded by former DCCC digital directors who privatized the party’s aggressive fundraising playbook. Since 2020, their network of PACs—Progressive Turnout Project, Stop Republicans, End Citizens United—has raised $678 million from individual donors. Only a small fraction has reached campaigns, as most was consumed by the extremely inefficient fundraising model.

The donor records revealed something darker: Systematic targeting of elderly Americans. One 89-year-old Indianapolis woman made 7,532 separate donations totaling $68,666. The tactics—manufactured urgency, fake “matches,” emotional manipulation—mirror elder financial fraud.

The problem extends far beyond rogue consultants. My analysis of FEC disbursement records showed campaigns now spend 38 cents of every dollar raised just to raise more money—a fourfold increase since 2004. In 2024, campaigns burned through $3 billion on fundraising operations alone. If current trends hold, fundraising will soon overtake advertising as the largest spending category.

The party’s own committees remain complicit. The DCCC and DSCC still send texts promising nonexistent “400% matches” and fake deadlines, legitimizing the predatory ecosystem. The situation has not improved this election cycle.

Shortly after my investigation was published, ActBlue contacted me. Within weeks ActBlue announced new policies prohibiting “aggressive, unethical, or deceptive fundraising behavior.” A good first step. But party leadership has remained silent, and the tactics continue. In the coming year, I’ll release a plan on how Democrats can reform their fundraising practices and return to a more efficient, respectful, and sustainable fundraising model.

Takeaway: The fundraising industrial complex has metastasized into the party’s largest expenditure—and its greatest credibility liability.

2. The Moderation Debate

The supposed electoral bonus for centrist candidates is a statistical illusion. After accounting for fundraising and incumbency, the advantage vanishes entirely.

The New York Times Editorial Board’s fall editorial arguing that moderation wins prompted two detailed responses. Their case rested on PAC endorsements—but their “moderate” candidates were disproportionately well-funded incumbents. In The New York Times Argues Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win. Here’s What Their Data Actually Shows, I showed that comparing like with like eliminated the effect. In The New York Times’ Moderation Advantage is a Statistical Mirage, I demonstrated that using voter perception data from the Cooperative Election Study—how voters actually see candidates—moderation shows no significant benefit.

The raw numbers reinforce this finding. Progressive incumbents in competitive districts since 2016 won 93.3% of their races. Moderate incumbents: 83.6%. Of 22 Democratic incumbents who lost between 2016 and 2024, 21 were moderates.

What does drive election outcomes? Turnout. In 2024, registered Republicans voted at higher rates than registered Democrats in every state with available data. The pattern across election cycles is clear: Democratic vote share rises in lockstep with the partisan turnout ratio.

Takeaway: Democrats already run moderates in nearly every competitive seat—and still lose. What drives outcomes in recent elections is partisan turnout, not centrist positioning.

3. Authoritarian Tactics: The Ideological Purge

I began the year by bringing data to help document and contextualize the attacks by DOGE on federal agencies. This provided empirical confirmation that DOGE was never about efficiency but rather a vehicle for an ideological purge. This paralleled what we have seen in Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere as authoritarians attempt to consolidate control.

Using measures of agency ideology based on federal executives’ perceptions, I analyzed which agencies faced layoffs. The result was unambiguous: agencies perceived as liberal were overwhelmingly more likely to face staffing cuts. Ideology was the single strongest predictor—far outweighing agency size or budget. Nine out of ten federal employees laid off by DOGE worked in liberal-leaning agencies.

The GOP budget proposal completed the picture. Every single proposed budget increase went to conservative-leaning agencies. The Department of Defense—which DOGE initially promised to cut—received significant increases. Meanwhile, USAID and CFPB, the two most liberal-leaning agencies, faced the deepest cuts.

The targeting extended beyond agencies. Executive orders disproportionately hit law firms whose attorneys donate to Democratic candidates. OPM’s new “Merit Hiring Plan” now requires loyalty essays from federal job applicants—a return to the pre-1883 spoils system, implemented through HR paperwork.

Takeaway: DOGE systematically targeted liberal-leaning agencies for cuts while directing every budget increase to conservative-leaning agencies. The efficiency rationale was a cover for ideological restructuring.

4. Autocratic Legalism and The Assault on The Courts

The judiciary became a primary battleground this year, revealing a profound fracture in the constitutional order. I documented with data how different court levels treated administration policies. Federal district courts ruled against Trump administration actions most of the time—with resistance spanning the ideological spectrum. Even conservative judges pushed back. But the Supreme Court ruled in the administration’s favor with few exceptions during the same period.

The Supreme Court’s emergency docket made the disparity concrete. Then came the ruling curtailing nationwide injunctions—effectively neutralizing dozens of lower court decisions in a single stroke. This pattern exemplifies what scholars call "autocratic legalism"—the systematic weaponization of legal institutions to consolidate power while maintaining the appearance of legal process.

The assault extended to judges themselves. The federal arrest of sitting Judge Hannah Dugan marked an unprecedented escalation. The DOJ sued the entire 15-judge bench of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. In Federal Judges Are Begging Us to Pay Attention, I used computational text analysis to systematically document these assaults—and pointed to parallel tactics used by authoritarian regimes elsewhere, along with the resistance strategies that proved effective.

Takeaway: Lower courts applied the law and overwhelmingly ruled against the administration. The Supreme Court intervened to reverse them. The judiciary is now in open conflict with itself.

5. Oligarchy and The Unbelievable Cost of Billionaires

The political system is becoming increasingly detached from the majority and tethered to a tiny, wealthy elite.

The top 0.01% of donors—roughly 26,000 people—now provide over 50% of all federal campaign funds, up from under 10% in the 1980s.

The partisan disparity is stark. In 2024, Republicans received 56% of their funding from donors giving over $1 million. Democrats: 18%.

Meanwhile, the top 100 billionaires gained $1.094 trillion in 2024. 2025 marked the second year in a row where the wealth accumulated by the top 100 richest Americans would have easily covered the nation’s entire spending on groceries.

Takeaway: A small donor class now funds the majority of federal campaigns and holds wealth that dwarfs public budgets. This concentration is incompatible with representative democracy.

6. The Biased Politics of Government Shutdowns and How to End Them

Government shutdowns are not an unavoidable feature of our system. They arose from a single 1980 Justice Department memo that transformed federal employees’ livelihoods into bargaining chips.

The data shows shutdown rules are systematically biased. Agencies perceived to be aligned with Democratic priorities—like the EPA or Department of Education—face devastating furlough rates, while agencies like ICE and CBP remain largely operational.

This asymmetry explains why Republicans consistently trigger these crises while Democrats scramble to end them. The party comfortable with watching the government shutter holds all the cards.

In Why America’s Government Shutdowns Are a Self-Inflicted Crisis—And How to End Them, I traced the origins of this dysfunction and outlined how a single memorandum from a new Attorney General could end it.

Takeaway: Shutdowns are a policy choice, not a constitutional requirement. The rules are biased toward Republicans, and a future administration can fix them without legislation.

7. Who Really Blocks Housing?

I ended the year by putting the narrative that environmentalists are blocking housing in California to the test. In an analysis of over 1,200 CEQA lawsuits, I found that established environmental groups filed only 8% of cases. The real culprits: HOAs, wealthy individuals, and NIMBY groups filed 54%. Businesses filed twice as many lawsuits as environmental organizations—often to stifle competition or block regulations. In How Regulation by Litigation Strangled American Abundance, I traced how environmental law has been weaponized by wealthy gatekeepers to block growth, not protect ecosystems.

Takeaway: The problem isn't environmentalism. It's a legal system that empowers the privileged to manufacture scarcity.

8. Generational Politics and the Age Gap

American politicians are the oldest of any developed democracy, creating a profound disconnect between those who make decisions and those who must live with the consequences.

The mismatch is acute within the Democratic Party. Half of Democratic senators are over 67 years old. Half of registered Democratic voters are under 50—a 17-year gap between representatives and voters.

In research with Jake Grumbach, we found the average political dollar now comes from a 67-year-old donor—up from 61 just eight years ago. The trend was sharper than we expected. Only later did I discover what was driving it: the predatory fundraising tactics targeting seniors documented above.

Meanwhile, older generations project their racial anxieties onto the youth. However, the data tells a different story. Racial resentment is collapsing among Gen Z across every demographic—education, gender, geography, and religion. They are the most racially progressive generation in American history, moving forward even as the political class remains stuck.

Takeaway: The widening age gap between American leadership and the public is an institutional story. It is sustained by a fundraising ecosystem that increasingly relies on the elderly to fund a political class largely divorced from the most racially progressive generation in American history.

9. Anti-Corruption Politics and the Path Forward

Eighty percent of Americans believe major donors have too much influence. Corruption is the Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes and frequently their downfall. A party that proves it is not for sale can unite disparate groups around a shared grievance against a rigged system.

Republicans have made this easy. When pollsters ask voters to describe the Republican Party, the most common response is “corrupt.” But Democrats can’t capitalize without credibility. Unlike Republicans, who depend on billionaire backers, Democrats have the structural fundraising advantage to reject mega-donor money and still compete.

Takeaway: Anti-corruption messaging requires no ideological tradeoffs and unites people across demographic and ideological lines. But it only works if Democrats reform themselves first.

Looking Ahead to 2026

In the coming year, I’ll be digging deeper into the fundraising industrial complex. The more I examine the numbers, the worse it looks—and I’ll be releasing a plan for how Democrats can reform their fundraising model and return to a more efficient, respectful, and sustainable approach.

Anti-corruption politics will be a central focus. I’ll be developing concrete proposals for how Democrats can leverage their structural fundraising advantage to reject mega-donor money and gain the credibility to make corruption the defining issue of the 2026 midterms.

I’ll continue tracking the courts, the agencies, and the ongoing assault on democratic institutions—documenting what’s happening and pointing to resistance strategies that have worked elsewhere.

Thank you for reading. The work to build a stronger and more equitable democracy continues.

Environmental review? Complete. Community input? Years of it. Local approval? Check.

For a moment, it looked like progress. Protesters tried to physically halt the work, tearing down fences and swarming the site, but they failed. Then the courts stepped in.

The bulldozers went silent. Toppled fencing and felled trees cluttered the grounds, a testament to how easily the machinery of the law can bring the physical world to a standstill. Students wondered whether the university had changed its mind again. It hadn’t. But a handful of local homeowners had found the power to stop it.

They invoked California’s Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to sue on the grounds that the university failed to adequately study environmental impacts. The claim was surreal: that the sound of students living—talking, laughing, socializing—should be legally classified as pollution.

Incredibly, the court agreed, ruling that “loud student parties” were indeed an environmental impact requiring mitigation. As Governor Gavin Newsom later put it, “a few wealthy Berkeley homeowners” had successfully weaponized state law to block housing for thousands.

The lawsuit froze construction for nearly two years. Emergency legislation had to be introduced in Sacramento. By the time the California Supreme Court finally stepped in to clarify that drunk students do not constitute an environmental impact, millions had been added to the project’s cost and thousands of students had spent another year scrambling for a place to live.

The story of People’s Park captures something essential about how modern America works and how it doesn’t. Our most urgent challenges to growth, from housing to infrastructure to clean energy, do not fail for lack of political will or administrative approval. They fail by attrition. They are funneled into a legal gauntlet where the friction of procedure—the delay, the cost, the uncertainty—becomes a prohibitive tax on progress.

What’s more, the specter of litigation often stops progress before it even starts. The mere anticipation of a lawsuit can chill innovation, deter investment, and prevent badly needed projects from ever breaking ground. Even when local agencies do try to build, the red tape they impose is rarely driven by genuine environmental concern, but by a desire to insulate themselves from future legal challenges. Cities bury themselves in bureaucracy not to please planners, but to preempt plaintiffs.

Scarcity in America is manufactured not mainly by environmentalists or bureaucrats, but by a litigation-centric legal system that empowers wealthy gatekeepers to block growth. We often blame bureaucrats or red tape for the country’s paralysis. But the fault lies less in the rules than in who has the resources to weaponize them.

II. Scarcity is Manufactured by The Courts, Not Bureaucrats

A growing movement of abundance thinkers, popularized by writers like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, has diagnosed the symptom: America has become stunningly bad at building things. But the diagnosis often stops at red tape or bureaucracy. This misses the deeper, structural rot. The problem isn’t just that the rules are strict; it is that the mechanism of enforcing them has shifted from the agency to the courtroom.

The abundance framing has resonated across the political spectrum. Progressive supply-siders—and the YIMBY groups led by young progressives that have become one of the most inspiring political movements of the era—argue that a prosperous, decarbonized future requires building at a scale Americans haven’t seen since the postwar boom. Centrists see the inability to build as a crisis of state capacity and economic competitiveness. Conservative reformers point to red tape and administrative sprawl as evidence of government dysfunction. Everyone agrees that something is broken.

But Klein and Thompson’s deeper point is often misunderstood. The problem isn’t that government is too big. It’s that its structure has become brittle, encrusted with procedural demands that make decisive action nearly impossible.

The abundance literature focuses mostly on administrative permitting: environmental reviews, zoning boards, public comment requirements. But beneath these administrative hurdles lies a more foundational choke point, one that shapes how every regulation operates.

That choke point is the courts.

America did not always govern this way. The pivotal moment came in 1970, when Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The law required federal agencies to assess the environmental consequences of major actions, a new concept at the time but one broadly supported.

Agencies initially treated it as a paperwork exercise. Then came the 1971 case Calvert Cliffs’ Coordinating Committee v. Atomic Energy Commission, in which the D.C. Circuit Court declared that NEPA’s review obligations were “judicially enforceable.” Overnight, NEPA transformed from an administrative duty into a litigation engine.

Environmental review was no longer just a task for agencies; it was a weapon for citizens.

California passed its own version, CEQA, the same year. When Governor Ronald Reagan signed it, the law applied only to public projects. It was modest, cautious, and bureaucratic.

Then, in 1972, in a case called Friends of Mammoth v. Board of Supervisors, the California Supreme Court expanded CEQA’s reach to the entire private economy. The ruling subjected every private project requiring a permit—from shopping centers to condo buildings—to environmental review, and therefore to potential lawsuits.

The decision stunned lawmakers. San Francisco froze all building permits. The legislature imposed an emergency moratorium while it scrambled to react. California agencies suddenly found themselves overwhelmed with environmental impact reviews, as virtually every private development requiring a permit now triggered CEQA’s requirements.

The seismic shift wasn’t the requirement to review. It was the invitation to sue.

While CEQA is the most extreme example of litigation-driven policymaking, the pattern exists nationally. Under the federal NEPA, courts—not agencies—often determine whether major projects can move forward. A recent review found that federal agencies won roughly 80 percent of NEPA cases in 2022, yet even successful projects spent years in procedural battles over modeling assumptions, alternatives, and data adequacy. The litigation itself becomes the regulatory process. NEPA shows how judicialized environmental review operates when confined to federal megaprojects; CEQA shows what happens when that model is extended to every housing development and transit line in a state.

What had been a system of administrative judgment became a system of adversarial legal combat, where success depended not on environmental science but on the ability to hire counsel and endure years of uncertainty. America became a place where environmental regulation was not primarily made by agencies but by courts—and where any sufficiently motivated opponent could weaponize procedure to block growth.

This is “regulation by litigation” in action. The legislature passed a reasonable environmental measure. Then the courts decided that what was meant to be regulated would instead be endlessly litigated.

III. Who Actually Uses These Laws to Block Projects?

The common belief is that environmentalists—green nonprofits, activists, conservationists—are the main users of CEQA lawsuits. They are the villains in many abundance narratives, the foot soldiers of procedural obstruction.

The narrative is that environmental law pits public-interest crusaders against corporate polluters. But the data tells a different story. In an analysis of 1,234 CEQA cases covering the period from 1973 to 2025, I found that established environmental organizations accounted for only about 8 percent of lawsuits.

When genuine environmental groups sue, they look nothing like the obstructionist caricatures they are often painted as. The Sierra Club challenged groundwater extraction that threatened regional aquifers; the Center for Biological Diversity fought to protect the unarmored threespine stickleback; the Cleveland National Forest Foundation litigated over countywide emissions. Their lawsuits focused primarily on ecosystems, climate, and public health.

Moreover, these organizations tend to concentrate on rural projects where the ecological stakes are high. When it comes to the lawsuits that are actually killing housing abundance in our cities, environmental groups are simply not there. They rarely challenge housing projects. When they do, it’s not apartment buildings in city centers but rather massive subdivisions on the urban fringe that would convert thousands of acres of wildland into sprawl.

The docket is instead crowded by a different kind of plaintiff: homeowners associations, wealthy individuals, and ad hoc community groups formed solely to oppose specific projects. Groups with names like “Save Lafayette Trees” appear repeatedly, sounding like conservationists but acting like property defenders. While established environmental groups fight for wetlands and water safety, these local groups target infill housing and mixed-use developments in neighborhoods that are already paved. Their concerns are almost exclusively local, private, and property-oriented.

In Marin County, a local HOA sued to block affordable senior housing, citing strained concerns about ambulance emissions and “social congregation impacts.” Meeting minutes revealed the true motivation was a fear regarding property values and demographic change. The developer ultimately abandoned the project; luxury townhouses, which faced no opposition, were built instead.

In another instance, a homeowner opposing a new apartment building argued that it would diminish the value of a Victorian he had renovated and hoped to convert into a bed-and-breakfast. Elsewhere, a group of neighbors raised concerns about the loss of sunlight, privacy, and parking, complaints the court bluntly categorized as personal NIMBY interests. Sometimes, this legal creativity borders on the absurd. Opponents of a Planned Parenthood clinic argued that protests outside the facility would generate “environmental impacts.” The case failed, but not before causing years of delay.

HOAs are hardly bastions of left-wing environmental radicalism. They are some of the most structurally conservative, exclusionary institutions in American civic life, “little platoons” of property defense. Yet, they remain among the most prolific users of environmental regulations.

For the modern obstructionist, zoning and litigation are a two-front war. Their first line of defense is the zoning board, where they fight to maintain bans on apartments or mixed-use buildings. But as the YIMBY movement succeeds in legalizing density—as California recently did by ending exclusive single-family zoning—these groups have simply retreated to their second line of defense: the courtroom. They don’t need to win on the merits; they just need to impose enough delay to kill the project’s financing

Businesses and commercial entities file twice as many lawsuits as environmental groups, yet their motives rarely concern conservation. Instead, they weaponize the law in two distinct ways.

First, they use CEQA to stifle competition. In one egregious example, a gas station owner sued to block a competitor’s expansion across the street, using inflated emissions concerns as legal cover. In a remarkable federal case, a hotel developer alleged that its rival used environmental challenges as a form of extortion, essentially saying, pay us or we’ll keep suing.

Second, and most frequently, businesses employ a tactic known as “reverse CEQA” to block environmental regulation. Challenging new rules is the single most common reason businesses file CEQA lawsuits. Oil refineries and paint manufacturers sue air quality management districts, arguing that mandatory pollution scrubbers would consume excessive water, or that “eco-friendly” low-emission paints are so nondurable they would actually increase waste. In one instance, a plastic bag manufacturer’s coalition even sued Manhattan Beach over its bag ban, arguing that paper bags had environmental impacts requiring review.

Finally, in a surprising number of cases, public agencies use taxpayer dollars to sue other public agencies—cities suing counties over jail expansions, school districts suing cities over new apartments—using environmental law as a tool for inter-agency turf wars.

Rather than having to form a community group and raise their own legal funds, opponents simply pressure their local officials to weaponize the city attorney against the project. The result is a perverse loop where taxpayers fund the construction of public infrastructure, and then fund the lawsuit to stop it. Consider the spectacle of the Beverly Hills Unified School District and the City of Beverly Hills suing the L.A. Metropolitan Transportation Authority to block a subway tunnel. While their lawsuit invoked high-minded concerns about seismic risks and air quality, the administrative record revealed a more candid motivation: fears of “decreased value in homeowners’ properties.”

Environmental law has become a tool disproportionately wielded by the wealthy against growth in affluent areas, while the places suffering the worst environmental harms often lack the legal firepower to fight the pollution they actually endure. This is not a story about environmentalism gone too far. It is a story about a legal system that has become a machine for entrenching wealth and power.

IV. American Regulation is a Lawyer’s Economy

What ties these stories together is the economics of lawyering. As Francis Fukuyama has argued, America’s “judicialization of functions that in other developed democracies are handled by administrative bureaucracies has led to an explosion of costly litigation, slow decision-making, and highly inconsistent enforcement of laws.” Compared to Germany or Japan, where specialized tribunals resolve planning disputes in months, America routes everything through courts that can take years.

Our system of proceduralism creates a vast economy for the legal profession. Every extra step—new filings, new appeals, new injunctions—generates billable hours. The incentives are structurally misaligned: what enriches lawyers and empowers the fortunate few who can afford their services imposes scarcity on everyone else. The result is a peculiar form of regulatory capture: not by industry, but by the legal industry itself.

This dynamic has roots in the legal progressivism movement of the 1970s. When Ralph Nader’s activists pioneered the litigation-centered model of governance, the goal was to check corporate power. But the tools forged by activists to fight polluters and check corporate power are now sold to the highest bidder to check public progress.

My research on the legal profession shows that American lawyers as a group are left-leaning but the outcomes they produce for their paying clients generally are not. They preside over a regulatory system that is structurally conservative, designed to preserve the status quo and protect wealth.

Critics might argue that litigation provides essential checks on development. Without the ability to sue, wouldn’t developers run roughshod over communities?

This is a fair concern, but the current system doesn’t actually protect the vulnerable—it empowers the wealthy. A Marin County HOA can spend years litigating against ambulance emissions. The communities most harmed by pollution—poor, largely nonwhite neighborhoods in California’s Central Valley or South Coast air basins—lack the resources and legal firepower to fight the pollution they actually endure.

The consequence is a distinctly American form of scarcity: a political economy in which delay is easy, judicial review is expansive, and building anything—from a wind farm to a subway station—requires surviving a gauntlet designed for maximum contestation and minimal resolution.

V. The Abundance Agenda Begins With Legal Reform

If abundance means building more—more housing, more transit, more clean energy—then the first step is to reform the legal system that makes building slower, costlier, and riskier than it needs to be. The goal of reform should not be to abolish environmental review, but to distinguish legitimate environmental stewardship from legal gamesmanship. This requires a fundamental restructuring of who can sue, where they sue, and what happens when they lose.

The most critical gatekeeping mechanism is standing, the right to bring a lawsuit. Today, standing under laws like CEQA is effectively universal, allowing anyone with a grievance to halt a project. A functioning system would limit this right to those protecting the genuine public interest, rather than private property. This requirement is the key to ending the plague of pop-up NIMBY groups and business competitors who masquerade as environmentalists to settle private scores. If a project genuinely threatens an ecosystem, the suit should be allowed; a neighbor worried about their view of the bay should not be granted the same legal weapon.

California took a significant step this summer when Governor Newsom signed AB 130 and SB 131, exempting most urban infill housing from CEQA—the most consequential reform to the law in over fifty years. For qualifying projects, it eliminates the litigation threat entirely. But the fix is narrow. Broader clean energy projects, transmission lines, commercial development, and any housing that opponents can claim to a sympathetic judge doesn’t fit the criteria remain exposed. And the broader legal architecture—universal standing, generalist courts, one-way fee shifting—is unchanged. Exemptions carve out categories; they do not reform the system that makes litigation so potent a weapon.

But the fix is narrow. Transit projects, clean energy infrastructure, commercial development, and housing that doesn’t qualify remain exposed to the same system of indefinite delay. And the broader legal architecture—universal standing, generalist courts, one-way fee shifting—is unchanged. Exemptions carve out categories; they do not reform the system that makes litigation so potent a weapon.

Beyond limiting who can sue, we must change where these disputes are heard. America stands alone among developed democracies in asking generalist judges to decipher complex ecological modeling on open-ended timelines. Land-use disputes should be removed from the general court system and routed to specialized administrative bodies staffed with experts in planning, ecology, and engineering. Because these decision-makers possess subject-matter fluency, they can distinguish technical errors from substantive harms in weeks rather than years. This would create a dedicated express lane for review that prioritizes scientific competence over procedural wrangling.

When litigation does occur, it must cease to be a tool of indefinite delay. We must end the practice of serial litigation, where opponents file lawsuit after lawsuit, raising new claims only after old ones fail. All claims should be consolidated into a single proceeding with a strict statutory timeline. Furthermore, courts must stop treating paperwork errors as construction emergencies. Currently, if a judge finds a flaw in an environmental review—even a minor one—the default remedy is to vacate the project’s permits and halt construction entirely while the agency goes back to fix it. This is needlessly destructive. Courts should instead adopt “remand without vacatur,” a standard already common in federal administrative law: order the agency to correct the error, but let the project continue while they do. The building keeps rising; the paperwork catches up.

Finally, we must stop subsidizing obstruction. The current system creates a perverse risk asymmetry: plaintiffs can recover their legal fees if they win, but rarely pay if they lose. This one-way fee shifting encourages speculative litigation by making obstruction essentially free. To balance the scales, we should require plaintiffs to pay the defendants’ legal costs when suits are found to be clearly pretextual, non-environmental, or filed by repeat abusers of the system. By introducing financial risk for bad-faith actors, we can force opponents to think twice before using the courts simply to impose delays.

Reforming the legal system is a monumental challenge. The legal profession is politically powerful and invested in the status quo that enriches lawyers while empowering wealthy interests to block transit, housing, and clean energy. My research on the political economy of the bar shows that the United States is an outlier among developed democracies: American lawyers are the most numerous and highest compensated in the world, yet the U.S. simultaneously ranks a distant last in terms of ordinary citizens’ ability to access and afford civil justice. This self-regulation of the legal profession correlates not only with higher litigation costs but with greater economic inequality. If progressives and liberals can exploit the widening gap between the legal profession’s economic incentives (scarcity) and its political values (equity), regulating the legal profession would not only unleash growth but curb a major source of inequality.

VI. The Progressive Roots of the Abundance Agenda

The distortion of environmental law is emblematic of a much larger phenomenon. Housing is the most visible arena, but litigation slows growth everywhere. Fossil-fuel groups sue to halt wind farms, corporations manipulate patent law to block competitors, and infrastructure projects face routine delays through strategic lawsuits. In America, power expresses itself through litigation. If you can pull a legal lever, you can choke a project.

The fight against manufactured scarcity is not new. It is the modern incarnation of a battle that animated the first wave of American progressivism.

The Progressive-era economist Henry George argued over a century ago that the greatest threat to shared prosperity was the parasitic behavior of land speculators. He saw a class of people who produced nothing, yet profited enormously by monopolizing land and charging others for access. Their wealth came not from innovation or labor, but from passively owning a scarce resource and collecting the value created by the community around them.

The wealthy homeowner using environmental laws to block affordable housing is the modern heir to George’s land speculator. They use a privileged position—not just wealth, but access to a complex, expensive, and exclusive legal system—to hoard opportunity and choke off growth. Like the speculator, they profit from a scarcity they actively maintain.

The modern push for abundance is often framed as a break from progressive tradition. In reality, it is a return to it. Progressives typically defend regulation as a check on corporate power. But when the regulatory environment becomes captured by the wealthy—used to exclude the vulnerable and protect asset values—reforming that system is a distinctively progressive project.

The original aim of the Progressive movement was to break the power of entrenched interests—trusts, monopolists, and political machines—that used procedural advantages to stifle the public will. Today, the entrenched interest is not a railroad trust; it is a legal complex that allows private property owners to veto public goods.

While George’s solution was to tax the unearned wealth from land, our first step must be to dismantle the legal weapons that allow this modern gentry to protect their fiefdoms at everyone else’s expense.

It is clear that our permitting process is broken. But we cannot fix these problems without confronting their source: a legal system designed by lawyers, for lawyers, and exploited by the wealthy to manufacture scarcity. Permitting reform will only get us so far if litigation-friendly courts can simply reinterpret those reforms to preserve their own empire. A pro-growth future can be legislated into existence only to be litigated to death.

Henry George warned us a century ago that the greatest enemy of progress was the passive extraction of value by those who own the land. Reforming the legal system that primarily benefits modern gentry is not a betrayal of progressive values. It is a return to them.

The real story isn't about the ads you see but the power you don't. It's about the candidates who never run, the policies that never get debated, and the slow, systemic drift of our democracy away from the will of the majority.

We tend to imagine corruption as a transaction: money buying votes, quid pro quos in backrooms. But money's real power is quieter and deeper. It decides which candidates get to run, which policies are thinkable, and whose voices get amplified or ignored. It has rewritten the rules of self-government—slowly, invisibly, and almost entirely within the law.

The Supreme Court has locked the front doors to reform, but the side doors remain open. To see where to start, we need to understand how money actually works inside the system—ranked from least to most consequential.

#5. Campaign Advertising: The Illusion of Influence

Here's what surprises everyone: the billions spent on campaign ads during general elections have remarkably little power to change voting behavior.

For decades, political scientists have rigorously studied this question, and the findings are overwhelmingly consistent. General election advertising—whether television or online, positive or negative—barely moves the needle when it comes to persuading voters to switch parties. Think about your own experience. How many attack ads would you need to see before abandoning your party and voting for the other side? Five? Ten? A thousand? If you're like most voters, the question itself sounds absurd.

Most people's political identities aren't built on flimsy preferences; they're powerful and durable. Your party affiliation acts as a social and psychological anchor. For most voters, a 30-second ad is like a paper airplane thrown against a brick wall—like running a commercial during the Super Bowl to convince Eagles fans to start rooting for the Cowboys. Their identity is tied to the team; they are unmovable.

A landmark meta-analysis by Joshua Kalla and David Broockman found that spending on campaign outreach—including Super PAC spending and online advertising—has essentially zero persuasive effect on voter choice in general elections. More recently, a massive 2020 study involving over 60,000 Facebook users found that removing all political ads from their feeds had no measurable impact on candidate favorability or vote choice. My own analysis of 1.2 million precinct-level results confirms this: doubling an opponent's Super PAC spending typically shifts the vote share by just 0.02 percentage points—roughly 75 votes in a typical congressional district.

Political advertising is the wellness vitamin of the campaign world—a pricey remedy backed more by faith than evidence. A vast industry of political consultants profit by convincing candidates they can't win without ever-increasing doses, turning them into endless fundraisers. The other beneficiaries are the media companies generating billions in revenue selling ad space. For candidates and voters, however, the return on investment is vanishingly small. The real influence of money lies elsewhere.

#4. Voter Mobilization: The Costly Ground Game

If ads designed to persuade voters are largely ineffective, what about voter mobilization? Here, money does have a more tangible effect. Candidates and parties invest in sophisticated get-out-the-vote operations that demonstrably increase turnout. But the data shows surprisingly modest results for huge expenditures.

Decades of research consistently find that traditional canvassing, phone calls, and mailers typically increase turnout by only one to three percentage points. In a close election, that can be decisive. A two-point bump in a congressional district with 400,000 voters is 8,000 votes—more than enough to swing a tight House race. This is why campaigns pour millions into their ground games; in a battle of inches, every inch matters.

However, these efforts are incredibly expensive and their impact is dwarfed by larger structural forces. The single biggest determinant of turnout isn't a last-minute phone call but the perceived importance of the election itself. Turnout in presidential years always exceeds midterms. Voters in battleground Wisconsin are far more likely to vote than those in safe states where the outcome is foregone.

The most significant barrier to voting has little to do with campaign spending: it's voter registration. Unlike most democracies, the U.S. places the burden of registration on individual citizens. Every time you move, especially across state lines, you must re-register—a process that can be confusing and cumbersome. Policies like automatic voter registration have far greater impact on turnout than any get-out-the-vote campaign ever could.

#3. The Money Primary: The Great Filter

So if money doesn't persuade voters and only modestly mobilizes them, where does its real power lie?

Before a single vote is cast, candidates must survive what insiders call the "money primary." This invisible, high-stakes contest demonstrates the ability to raise substantial funds. Because of partisan sorting and gerrymandering, the winner of the general election in most districts is a foregone conclusion. This makes the primary election the place where money truly matters, and as former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously put it, that contest is about "money, money, money."

Candidates without early financial backing from wealthy networks struggle to hire staff, gain media attention, and establish credibility. Many promising candidates drop out due to lack of funds before voters ever get a chance to evaluate them.

This financial gauntlet fundamentally skews who can realistically compete for office, resulting in a political class that looks nothing like America.

The median net worth of a member of Congress exceeds $1 million—roughly 12 times the median American household. While blue-collar and service-industry Americans comprise the majority of the workforce, they hold fewer than 3 percent of congressional seats.

There is a reason for that and it's not because voters prefer wealthy candidates. Running for office means months of unpaid campaigning, a luxury mostly only the financially secure can afford.

But having personal wealth isn't enough; what matters more is access to other people's wealth. This explains the dominance of the legal profession. While lawyers make up less than half of a percent of the American workforce, they hold nearly half of all congressional seats.

The scale of this imbalance is hard to overstate: relative to the average citizen, a millionaire is 10 times more likely to serve in Congress. Lawyers, by comparison, are nearly 100 times more likely. This is largely because of the money primary. My research finds that lawyers running for the House raise twice as much money in the critical first 90 days of a campaign as candidates from other backgrounds. This cash doesn't come from the public at large—about half comes directly from other lawyers. It is a closed loop of professional influence that filters out those who can't tap into a similar network.

Our elections operate less as a meritocracy producing the best leaders and more as a filter isolating the most financially connected ones. The result is a Congress where the daily economic grind of most Americans is understood only in the abstract by the people writing the laws.

The same filter that screens out working-class Americans also screens out younger ones—and for related reasons. My recent research with Jake Grumbach reveals how the campaign finance system acts as a pillar of American gerontocracy. The average political dollar now comes from a 67-year-old donor—up from 61 just eight years ago. Meanwhile, the median American is 38. Our democracy speaks with a voice nearly three decades older than its people, and that gap is widening. This creates a massive structural disadvantage for younger candidates: a 65-year-old challenger raises, on average, $207 more per early donor than a 35-year-old running in the same district. When political money talks with a 67-year-old voice, it's no wonder our policies so often look backward rather than forward. In his other research, Grumbach has shown that these fundraising pressures act similarly with respect to race as they do age.

Even for those who make it through the filter, the pressure only intensifies. Many members of Congress spend hours most day in call rooms, dialing for dollars for their next campaign. Imagine landing your dream job, only to discover that half your workday will be spent not on the work itself but on cold-calling strangers to beg for money.

This constant fundraising diverts enormous time and energy away from the actual work of governing. But the damage is deeper. It filters for a specific personality type: not necessarily the most thoughtful public servant but the one most comfortable with relentless solicitation. And it poisons the relationship between parties and their own supporters.

This desperation has spawned what I've called the fundraising-industrial complex. In 2024, campaigns burned through $3 billion just asking for more money, nearly as much as they spent on advertising. The result is increasingly manipulative appeals—subject lines screaming "BETRAYAL" or "Last Chance"—that treat supporters like ATMs rather than allies and erode trust in parties and the political process.

#2. Corporate Lobbying: The Power Brokers

While the public fixates on corporate campaign donations, this is often misdirection. The real action happens after the election is over, and its primary vehicle is lobbying.

Corporations and their trade groups have spent over $30 billion on federal lobbying since 2015. Sophisticated companies deploy a coordinated assault to shape policy. They use lobbying expenditures to influence the specific language of legislation; they exploit the "revolving door" to hire former government officials with insider knowledge and access; and they use strategic campaign donations not to buy votes but to buy goodwill, ensuring their lobbyists get a meeting when key decisions are being made.

Consider the pharmaceutical industry. During the 2022 election cycle, while public attention focused on PAC contributions totaling around $14 million, the industry spent $776 million on lobbying. This army of lobbyists, many of them former congressional staffers, didn't just oppose drug-pricing reform; they rewrote it from the inside, ensuring that even reform legislation preserved their profit margins.

The pattern repeats across industries. During the Dodd-Frank financial reform debates, Wall Street firms spent millions on campaign contributions but poured hundreds of millions into lobbying—and into hiring former regulators and congressional staffers who knew exactly which provisions to target. The result was a law riddled with carve-outs and loopholes, its rulemaking process stretched over years as lobbyists fought line-by-line battles over implementation. By the time the regulations took effect, they had been hollowed out in ways the public never saw.

The real corporate money isn't spent trying to sway your vote; it's spent in the halls of Congress, ensuring that by the time a bill comes up for a public vote, it has already been molded to serve their interests.

#1. The Ultra-Wealthy: Entrenching Oligarchy

Here we arrive at money's most dangerous influence, where the political system becomes fundamentally detached from the will of the majority and tethered to the preferences of a tiny, wealthy elite.

When the policy preferences of wealthy Americans conflict with those of everyone else, the wealthy always win. Not sometimes. Not on certain issues. Exposed to the same debates, offered the same choices, average and low-income citizens simply do not see their preferences reflected in policy outcomes at anywhere near the same rate.

This isn't a partisan story—my analysis of the Forbes 400 richest Americans shows their wealth tends to grow faster under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. The real goal of mega-donor influence isn't to secure a specific party’s victory but to ensure that the political system, regardless of who is in charge, remains friendly to the interests of extreme wealth. It's about creating a "heads I get a subsidy, tails I get a tax loophole" policy environment.

This goes beyond lobbying; it's about the direct, personal power of mega-donors to shape government itself. After spending over $250 million to help elect Donald Trump in 2024, Elon Musk was rewarded with something unprecedented: a seat at the table of federal power. Through the Department of Government Efficiency, the world's richest man was granted extraordinary access to reshape the federal bureaucracy—inserting himself into decisions about which agencies to cut, which contracts to cancel, and which regulations to eliminate. Many of those decisions directly affected his own companies. That the relationship later soured doesn't diminish the point: a quarter-billion dollars purchased not just access, not just influence, but a quasi-governmental role that no voter elected him to fill.

Consider another example: When Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign endorsed a budget proposal including a 25 percent minimum tax on unrealized gains over $100 million—a policy affecting perhaps 10,000 of the wealthiest Americans—billionaire Mark Cuban publicly threatened to oppose her. The campaign, which had officially endorsed the policy, suddenly went silent and refused to comment when pressed by reporters. For context, 10,000 people is roughly the number of Americans who own pet tigers. A presidential campaign would not immediately backtrack if Joe Exotic claimed the country would never financially recover from a tax on tiger breeding. But when Mark Cuban made essentially the same self-interested argument, it carried real political weight.

Or consider the 2017 Republican tax bill—the signature legislative achievement of unified GOP government. The bill delivered a massive corporate rate cut and passed-through business deductions that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, while providing modest, temporary relief to middle-class families. Republican donors were explicit about the stakes. As Representative Chris Collins admitted at the time: "My donors are basically saying, 'Get it done or don't ever call me again.'" Senator Lindsey Graham warned that failure to pass the bill would mark the end of the GOP as a party. The legislative priority wasn't shaped by public demand—polls showed the bill was deeply unpopular—but by the financial threat from mega-donors who expected a return on their investment.

This dynamic is warping our political parties. In the 2024 election cycle, an astonishing 56 percent of all contributions to Republican federal campaign committees came from mega-donors giving over $1 million each. When a major party becomes so dependent on such a tiny sliver of the population, it inevitably drifts from "one person, one vote" toward "one dollar, one vote."

Here lies the ultimate irony, the thread that connects the surprising ineffectiveness of campaign advertising to the alarming power of oligarchs: mega-donors' influence doesn't primarily come from their ability to sway voters. As we've seen, advertising has remarkably limited persuasive effect. Instead, their leverage comes from convincing politicians that they need mega-donor money to win. Politicians become dependent on the wealthy not because the money actually delivers votes, but because they believe it does. This belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating a vicious cycle where the perceived need for big money gives billionaires outsized influence over the entire system, even when their campaign contributions don't meaningfully affect electoral outcomes. The oligarchs' real power isn't buying elections; it's buying the faith of the political class.

What Can Be Done?

Overturning Citizens United has become a rallying cry for reformers, and it's a worthy goal—corporations shouldn't be able to spend unlimited sums on elections. But the honest truth is that Citizens United is not the root of the problem, and simply overturning it would be far from sufficient.

The foundational damage was done in 1976, when Buckley v. Valeo established that spending money is constitutionally protected speech. That's the decision that put campaign finance reform in a legal straitjacket. And here's what most people miss: corporations were already content to spend most of their political money on lobbying before Citizens United, and they largely still are. With a few notable exceptions like the cryptocurrency industry's recent electoral spending spree, corporate America has not rushed to dominate elections directly. The explosion of super PAC money comes overwhelmingly from ultra-wealthy individuals, not corporations. Even if the Court reversed Citizens United tomorrow, the oligarchs would remain.

The front doors to reform are locked. But that doesn't mean nothing can be done.

First, there's growing evidence that public financing works. Seattle's democracy voucher program gives every resident $100 in vouchers to donate to local candidates, fundamentally changing who can afford to run. New York City's matching funds program amplifies small donations, reducing candidates' dependence on wealthy donors. The results are visible in this year's mayoral races in both cities, which feature more diverse candidates from more varied economic backgrounds than the traditional money primary would ever allow. These programs don't require the Supreme Court's permission. They can be enacted by states and cities right now.

Unlike Republicans, who would face financial collapse without their billionaire backers, Democrats would not. With only 18 percent of their funds coming from mega-donors, Democrats claim a sizable fundraising advantage among grassroots supporters that enabled them to comfortably outraise Republicans in 2024. Yet the party continues to court billionaires while campaigning against oligarchy, a tension that undermines their credibility.

Democrats should act now to leverage this strength. They should voluntarily limit contributions from wealthy individuals and reject corporate PAC money entirely. In a previous analysis, I showed they could do this while still out fundraising Republicans. They can afford to walk away. And doing so would give them something money can't buy: the credibility to make corruption the central issue of the next election.

The benefits would be immense: the moral authority to attack Republican corruption without the crippling retort of "both sides do it," and the freedom to pursue policies that benefit working Americans without donor interference.

The choice isn't between winning with big money or losing without it. It's between perpetuating a broken system that only serves to hold them back and becoming the party they claim to be. Democrats have the fundraising strength to choose the higher ground. They should take it.

Republicans created this suffering deliberately, then offered to stop, but only if Democrats surrendered completely.

Eight Democratic senators took the deal. They secured nothing: no policy concessions, no protective mechanisms, not even a binding commitment on healthcare. Just Republicans agreeing to temporarily stop the pain they were inflicting.

For many watching this unfold, there’s been a persistent frustration with Democratic leadership’s unwillingness to fight, coupled with an inability to fully articulate why capitulation feels so dangerous. This wasn’t a normal legislative compromise, but a pattern of submission to deliberate cruelty that makes the next act of cruelty more likely.

Authoritarians worldwide have discovered how to exploit a weakness in democratic opposition: they weaponize our compassion against our principles. It’s a nasty tactic but an effective one. Create unbearable suffering. Wait for your opponents’ empathy to overwhelm their resolve. Then offer relief in exchange for political surrender.

The authoritarian doesn’t need to win arguments or offer genuine compromise. They need only inflict enough pain that resistance becomes morally unbearable.

Republicans understood this perfectly. They denied federal workers their pay and threatened food aid for millions—not to achieve any policy goal, but to demonstrate their willingness to hurt people indefinitely. The cruelty was the strategy. They were testing how much innocent suffering Democrats would tolerate before breaking.

Democratic identity rests partly on refusing to be callous about vulnerable people. That moral commitment is genuine strength. But Republicans have learned to convert it into a weapon. They engineer situations where Democrats’ own empathy compels their defeat. The more Democrats care about workers missing mortgage payments or families losing food assistance, the more reliably that compassion becomes a pressure point for exploitation.

Senator John Hickenlooper, who voted against the deal, saw the trap clearly: “42 million people were being held hostage... There’s no good solution.” This captures the dilemma’s cruel logic. The eight senators who folded weren’t claiming Republicans made a fair offer. They were saying the hostage situation had become too painful to endure.

Commentators keep analyzing this like a normal legislative deal, debating whether Democrats got enough in exchange. But that misses the point entirely. Republicans didn’t offer any actual concessions. They offered to stop hurting people. When your “negotiation” is just agreeing to stop inflicting pain, it’s extortion, not compromise. And when the opposition accepts those terms, they teach you that inflicting pain works.

To understand where this leads, study Viktor Orbán’s playbook in Hungary. When he returned to power in 2010, he manufactured crisis after crisis—economic emergency, migration panic, pandemic fear. Each time, opposition parties faced the same cruel calculus: resist and be blamed for deepening the crisis, or acquiesce and hope to fight another day.

Every surrender seemed rational. The crises were real. People suffered. The opposition couldn’t justify obstruction that would worsen immediate pain. So they voted for temporary emergency powers. They accepted limited executive authority. Orbán was teaching them to surrender. Each capitulation lowered the bar for the next. By the time they realized they needed to fight, they’d already given away the tools to resist. Hungarian democracy died through a series of reasonable-seeming surrenders to manufactured crises.

The shutdown deal represents precisely this kind of incremental collapse. Democrats secured nothing substantive, just a promise of a December vote on healthcare subsidies. Not actual policy. Not binding commitments. A vote that will almost certainly fail, leaving them in an identical position next month.

Senator Angus King explained that “Republicans made it clear they weren’t going to discuss the health care issue until the shutdown was over.” After 41 days and fourteen failed votes, this assessment was probably correct. But accepting those terms creates a devastating precedent.

Come December, when the promised healthcare vote fails, what leverage do Democrats have? Republicans now know exactly how much pain Democrats will endure before folding. They know the precise breaking point. If Democrats fight, Republicans know how long to wait them out. If Democrats don’t fight, they’ve admitted they have no leverage at all.

Even tactical retreat requires extracting a price. When Hungarian opposition parties voted for Orbán’s emergency measures, they at least tried to insert sunset clauses and oversight mechanisms. These mostly failed, but they raised the cost of the next power grab.

The eight senators secured nothing comparable. They got protections for workers furloughed during this shutdown, but zero structural changes to prevent the same tactic next month. No automatic continuing resolutions. No binding healthcare commitments. No mechanisms that would make future hostage-taking harder or more costly.

Senator Chris Murphy said “there’s no way to defend this.” Senator Bernie Sanders called it “a policy and political disaster.” By folding without securing meaningful concessions, Democrats have made the next hostage-taking more likely and their own position in it weaker.

The civil rights movement understood something these eight senators have apparently forgotten: nonviolent resistance is the opposite of acquiescence. When civil rights activists sat at lunch counters, when they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, when they filled the jails of Birmingham, they were demonstrating that their capacity to endure suffering exceeded their oppressors’ willingness to inflict it. Their power came not from avoiding pain but from showing they would bear it, that their resolve ran deeper than the cruelty arrayed against them, that they could not be broken. Each act of brutality against peaceful protesters did not break the movement. It revealed the moral bankruptcy of the system attacking them.

The Hungarian story doesn’t have to be the American story. But here’s what breaking the pattern requires: Democrats must demonstrate they can stand strong against Republican attempts to inflict suffering. Not because suffering is virtuous, but because it’s the only language of power in a hostage situation. The civil rights movement understood this. Each time they filled the jails, they raised the cost of oppression until it exceeded the oppressor’s willingness to pay. The alternative—calibrating your resistance to stay within bearable pain levels—just teaches your opponents exactly how much pain to inflict.

What we just witnessed was another turn of the ratchet in American democracy’s descent. But here’s what makes this moment particularly maddening: this is an elite failure, not a popular one. The Democratic base understands what’s at stake. Grassroots activists, organizers, and voters have shown they’re willing to fight. The failure lies with party leadership who mistake capitulation for pragmatism. Until Democratic leaders can be made to fear cowardice more than they fear Republicans, the pattern will continue.

The question now is whether that resolve can force elites to stop surrendering on their behalf. Whether we can remember, as a people, what the civil rights movement knew: that the only thing more powerful than the willingness to inflict suffering is the refusal—by leaders and citizens alike—to be broken by it.

Except it’s not. We’re the only major democracy that does this to itself.

I’ve been teaching American political institutions for the past 15 years. Almost without fail, at some point during the quarter the federal government either shuts down or comes to the brink of doing so. Each year another budget crisis. Each year I’d explain to students how other countries have actual safeguards. In parliamentary systems, a failed budget might trigger new elections. Others automatically continue funding at previous levels. Government shutdowns are yet another anomalous feature of American political institutions that we accept as unavoidable when it is anything but.

Government shutdowns aren’t required by the Constitution or any Supreme Court ruling. They arose from a Justice Department memo that reinterpreted the Antideficiency Act—a 19th-century law that limits obligations without appropriations—nearly a century after the legislation was enacted.

Before 1980, shutdowns didn’t happen. When funding gaps occurred, federal agencies kept operating. The understanding was straightforward: Congress would eventually pass the funding, everyone would get paid, and life would go on. Budget negotiations did not routinely devolve into national crises.

Then came the memo. In 1980, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a new interpretation of the Antideficiency Act. Beginning with Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, the OLC concluded that this old statute required most government operations to cease the moment appropriations lapsed. OLC lawyers offered their opinion on how things should work and everyone just sort of went along with it.

It may not have been clear at the time, but it turned federal employees’ livelihoods into bargaining chips. Every shutdown means hundreds of thousands of public servants—people who chose careers in public service—face mortgage payments without paychecks, childcare costs without income, and the grinding uncertainty of not knowing when normalcy will return. Their families plan around salaries that suddenly vanish for reasons that have nothing to do with their work or performance. This is beyond counterproductive. It’s outright disrespectful of the people who keep our government running. And this is to say nothing of the needless cruelty inflicted on millions of working families that depend on SNAP and other government services.

What Was Created by Memo Can Be Undone by Memo

Fixing this problem doesn’t require a constitutional amendment, a new statute, or some grand bipartisan bargain. It requires a new Attorney General to issue a new legal opinion.

It’s the rare institutional problem with a straightforward institutional solution. And any presidential candidate can make this commitment on the campaign trail: to direct their Attorney General to revisit the OLC memo upon taking office.

The next administration can move to end this recurring self-inflicted cycle of dysfunction with a single memorandum, which I’ve taken the liberty to draft a condensed version:

To: Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies

From: The Office of the Attorney General

Subject: [PROPOSED] Reconsideration of the Antideficiency Act During Lapsed Appropriations

This memorandum reconsiders and rescinds prior opinions (1980, 1981) concerning the Antideficiency Act (31 U.S.C. §§ 1341–1342) during periods when appropriations have lapsed. Those earlier opinions improperly concluded that the Act requires executive agencies to suspend nearly all operations.

We now conclude that the Antideficiency Act does not compel such cessation of ordinary government functions. The Act was intended to prevent agencies from obligating funds for programs Congress has not authorized, not to halt already-authorized programs during a temporary funding gap.

Therefore, agencies may lawfully continue ordinary operations when (1) Congress has duly authorized the underlying programs by law, and (2) operations are funded by permanent appropriations, multi-year appropriations, express statutory authorization to obligate in advance of appropriations, presidential constitutional authority, or activities necessarily implied from those authorized functions.

The Antideficiency Act was designed to stop agencies from spending money on programs Congress never authorized. It wasn’t meant to force government collapse because the next funding check for an already-authorized program is temporarily delayed by political dispute.

This memo returns us to the pre-1980 norm. It defuses the hostage situation. It transforms shutdowns from national crisis back to what they should be: mundane budget negotiations.

How Would This Affect Bargaining Dynamics?

Critics might worry that ending shutdowns would empower the President at Congress’ expense. The opposite is closer to the truth.

For nearly a century before 1980, the government continued operating during funding gaps without threatening the separation of powers. When Congress couldn’t agree on a budget, spending simply continued at current levels; the status quo became the fallback position rather than a government shutdown.

The current system creates what political scientists call a “reversion point” problem, best illustrated through Oregon’s experience with school funding. For decades, many Oregon school districts faced a cruel choice: voters could approve whatever budget the school board proposed, or funding would drop to catastrophically low levels, forcing schools to close. School boards learned to exploit this dynamic, proposing budgets far above what voters wanted, betting that voters would grudgingly approve rather than see their schools close.

Political scientists Romer and Rosenthal formalized this insight: when the fallback position is catastrophic, whoever controls the agenda gains enormous leverage. They can demand far more than in normal negotiations because the alternative is disaster. In Oregon, school boards could extract budgets well above what communities wanted because the alternative was no school at all. With federal shutdowns, the party more willing to accept governmental collapse—or whose priority agencies stay open during shutdowns—gains similar leverage.

More importantly, as the data shows, shutdown rules are strongly biased in favor of Republicans. This is why recent shutdowns have been due to Republicans in Congress, not presidential vetoes.

During shutdowns, agencies aligned with Democratic priorities face devastating furlough rates. Agencies that protect workers, enforce environmental laws, and provide social services are heavily affected. Agencies that Republicans like are mostly unaffected. Under the current shutdown rules, ICE can remain fully operational while the EPA is ground to a halt.

The party comfortable watching the government shutter holds all the cards. When your priorities stay funded while your opponent’s priorities collapse, why compromise?

The Political Reality: A One-Sided Problem

Congressional leaders might insist they need shutdowns as leverage—that without this threat, presidents won’t come to the table. This gets the recent history backwards. Nearly every shutdown in the past three decades stemmed from Congress’ own internal gridlock, its inability to send any bill to the president’s desk. These weren’t battles between Congress and the White House. They were congressional Republicans holding the government hostage to extract concessions they couldn’t win through normal legislation.

The current rules aren’t neutral. They’re a structural gift to the party that wants government to do less. Republicans keep their priorities funded during shutdowns while Democratic priorities—environmental protection, workplace safety, food assistance—get decimated. This asymmetry explains why Republicans consistently trigger these crises while Democrats scramble to end them. When the rules reward your side for creating chaos, why would you want to change them?

Democrats need to recognize this isn’t a shared problem requiring bipartisan solutions. It’s a systematic disadvantage they must fix when they have the power to do so. The next Democratic president should issue the corrective memo. No negotiation. No compromise. Just restore the system that worked for a century.

Political disagreement is a fixture of every democratic system. The problem isn’t that the parties disagree over the budget; it’s the institutional rule that transforms that disagreement into a crisis.

Bad incentives generate bad outcomes. When our system rewards legislators for taking the government hostage, we get exactly what we’re incentivizing: an unending carousel of shutdown threats and negotiations.

Yes, there will be legal challenges. Yes, institutional inertia resists change. But the original 1980 memo faced neither congressional approval nor judicial review—one administration simply decided to reinterpret a century-old law, and everyone accepted it. A new administration can decide to undo the damage by restoring the original interpretation.

It requires a new administration to recognize that this dysfunction is not permanent. It is a choice, and they can make a different one. It’s time to defuse the budget bomb.

The New York Times editorial, however, rests its case on one simple metric: PAC endorsements.

In my last piece, I explained why the electoral gains from a moderation-centric strategy are tapped out and proposed an alternative: a Clean vs. Corrupt anti-corruption platform that can actually win back voters.

In this post, I’m going to show why the evidence used to support the claim that moderates perform better is a statistical illusion.

The small electoral bump the Times attributes to moderation isn’t a feature of ideology at all. It’s a phantom effect created by ignoring the two most powerful forces in American elections: fundraising and incumbency. When we apply even the most basic statistical controls, the “moderation advantage” disappears completely.

This isn’t a complex academic debate. It’s a simple case of looking at the right numbers. Let’s walk through it.

The Flaw in the Simple Story

The Times’s analysis rests on a straightforward correlation: candidates they define as “moderate” (based on PAC endorsements) tend to do slightly better than those they don’t. But correlation, as the saying goes, is not causation.

People who carry EpiPens have higher rates of severe allergic reactions. But the EpiPen doesn’t cause allergies; people carry EpiPens because they have allergies. The Times made the same mistake: they saw candidates funded by centrist PACs winning more often and assumed moderation caused the wins, without checking whether these “moderates” were more likely to be well-funded incumbents.

They were. The candidates the Times labels “moderate” are significantly more likely to be well-funded incumbents. The problem becomes clear once you see who they’re actually comparing.

The Problem: Bad Comparisons

The Times compared “Moderates” (candidates funded by centrist PACs) against “Non-Moderates” (everyone else). But “everyone else” mixes two completely different groups:

1. Non-Moderates: Candidates who actually ran competitive campaigns but were not endorsed by moderate PACs.

2. “No PAC Funding” Candidates: Candidates who raised little to no money from any PACs. These are often non-competitive candidates running in unwinnable districts with little to no resources.

Unsurprisingly, these unfunded candidates underperform by 1.9 percentage points. But they’re not underperforming because they’re too progressive. They’re underperforming because they were never competitive to begin with. By construction, the Times’ non-moderate group is weighed down by candidates who were never going to win.

This contamination problem isn’t unique to the Times’ framing. We can prove it by flipping their analysis: what if we compared candidates backed by progressive PACs against everyone else?

Using the same methodology, progressives outperform Harris by +1.4 points while non-progressives underperform by -0.4 points. This is the mirror image of the Times’ result showing that moderates outperform by +1.4 points while non-moderates underperform by -0.6 points. Why? Because now it’s the non-progressive group (which includes moderates) that gets dragged down by unfunded candidates.

This is the Times’ first error: building their comparison on a contaminated sample. We can correct for this by filtering out all non-competitive candidates while still using their preferred measure of ideology. Let’s see what happens when we only compare PAC-funded moderates against PAC-funded non-moderates.

Step 1: The Surface-Level Correlation

What happens when we only compare funded candidates? After filtering out “No PAC Funding” candidates, we’re left with 335 Democratic candidates. When we run the Times’ simple, unadjusted analysis on this data, we still find a small moderation advantage of +0.99 percentage points.

Step 2: The Vanishing Effect

Now for the moment of truth. What happens when we adjust for money and incumbency?

The effect vanishes.

Moderation advantage after accounting for money/incumbency: +0.24 percentage points (a difference that is statistically and substantively indistinguishable from zero).

Once you compare like with like—candidates with similar funding and similar incumbent status—the ‘moderation advantage’ disappears.

The Real Methodological Problem

The Times editorial anticipates objections to its analysis by dismissing academic research as overly complex and disconnected from voter perceptions:

“[S]ome progressive analysts and professors say it has little effect. The debate involves statistical complexities that are difficult for most people to follow. Yet there is a simple way to see the weakness of the argument that moderation is unimportant.

The researchers making that claim rely on data about candidate ideology that can have little connection to voter perceptions… The data ends up being so messy as to produce bizarre results.”

This preemptive dismissal is telling. The Times needs to discredit academic research because that research has reached an inconvenient consensus: the electoral benefits of moderation have largely disappeared. An influential 2018 study claiming large advantage for moderates was corrected by its own authors, who now conclude the evidence “is far weaker than we previously thought, and should not be relied on.” More recent studies consistently find that moderation’s effect on vote shares is either small or statistically indistinguishable from zero, with party brand and turnout dynamics now dominating electoral outcomes.

Rather than engage with the evolving evidence, the editorial dismisses it as too “complex” and turns to what it presents as a simpler measure: PAC endorsements. But the editorial’s “simple” approach—lumping well-funded progressive candidates together with unfunded candidates running in unwinnable districts—is precisely the kind of “messy data” problem it warns about.

The editorial claims academic measures are disconnected from voter perceptions. Yet when we use data entirely based on voter perceptions (the Cooperative Election Study), we find no moderation advantage. In fact, measuring candidate ideology based on how voters perceive candidates showed the smallest effect size of any measure tested.

The issue isn’t methodological complexity. It’s that rigorous analysis—whether using various academic measures, voter perception data, or even the Times’ own PAC endorsements—consistently fails to show the large moderation advantage the editorial describes.

The idea that moderation helps candidates win isn’t extraordinary. My own research has documented real electoral benefits from moderation in past eras. But even ordinary claims require some evidence.

If the data showed a sizable moderation advantage today, I would be the first to report it. The issue here is that the evidence doesn’t support the claim. The uncomfortable truth is that the moderation advantage that once existed has faded, not because the theory was implausible, but because the electoral landscape has changed.

Moderation Will Not Save The Democratic Party

The Times based an entire political strategy on a statistical artifact. The small advantage they found was never about ideology. It was simply incumbency and fundraising in disguise. Once you account for those basic factors, there is zero statistical evidence in their own data that moderate candidates perform better. The phantom effect they discovered is just that: a statistical shadow cast by money and incumbency.

Even if we set aside the above analysis and accept the Times’ inflated estimate at face value—an effect we know to be artificially large—it would not have changed the outcome in a single competitive seat in 2024. The strategy has already been fully implemented. There are no more gains to be had. That would be true even if a moderate advantage existed, which it doesn’t.

This matters because the Democratic establishment is going all in on a strategy built on a mirage.

The real question isn’t whether to run moderates or progressives in swing districts. Democrats already run moderates in nearly every competitive seat—and they’re still losing. The question is what those candidates stand for.

Voters aren’t looking for ideological triangulation. They’re looking for someone who will fight a system they believe is fundamentally rigged. This is why I’ve argued for reframing the central conflict as Clean vs. Corrupt, an anti-corruption platform that directly confronts the institutional rot and elite capture that fuels voter rage across the political spectrum.

This doesn’t mean moderation itself is the problem. But it’s not the answer, either. If you’re looking for candidates who can win back the House, don’t just look for moderates who split the difference on policy. Look for moderates who can be credible anti-corruption reformers, candidates who can channel voter fury at a broken system into a concrete agenda for change.

To their credit, the Times engaged constructively with this analysis. After I replicated their work and identified a labeling error that had effectively doubled the apparent size of their effect, they promptly issued a correction and engaged in substantive dialogue about the data. I appreciate that willingness to engage, and I believe we share the same goal: understanding what actually works in modern elections.

That shared goal is precisely why the core problem can’t be dismissed. Even using their corrected numbers and their preferred measure of ideology, the “moderation advantage” disappears completely once you control for fundraising and incumbency. The Democratic Party is building its comeback strategy on this premise. If the premise is wrong, the strategy will fail—and they can’t afford to get this wrong.

The stakes are too high for wishful thinking. The data tells a different story than their editorial suggests, and Democrats need to hear it.

Data and Code Availability

All data and code used to generate the results in this analysis are publicly available and can be replicated. The repository includes:

• Complete replication code for all analyses and figures

• Cleaned datasets including candidate ideology scores, vote shares, fundraising data, and incumbency status

• Documentation explaining data sources and variable construction

The repository can be accessed at: https://github.com/abonica/nyt_moderates_analysis

This transparency allows readers to verify the findings, explore alternative specifications, or build upon this work.

The piece touched directly on a lengthy and thoughtful exchange I had with David Leonhardt of The Times over the past few weeks. I want to start by saying how much I appreciated that exchange. It was a rigorous, good-faith, and clarifying debate that forced both of us to sharpen our arguments. That kind of engagement is rare and valuable.

The final editorial makes a clear case, and on several points during our conversation, David and I found common ground. We agree that running moderates in the most difficult swing districts is a sound tactic. We agree that economic populism is a powerful message and that the Democratic party is harmed by its perception as a party of “overeducated professionals.”

But for those who have followed my work, it won’t be a surprise that I believe the editorial’s central conclusion is based on an incomplete reading of the evidence. Our conversation included several key data points and concepts that didn’t make it into the final piece. My goal here isn’t to rebut the editorial, but to share some of that missing context.

Three key points: First, when we measure how voters actually perceive candidates, moderation shows no significant advantage. Second, even using the editorial’s own data, Democrats would have gained zero additional seats by running more moderates in competitive seats. Third, of 22 Democratic incumbents who lost tough races since 2016, only one was progressive. The evidence suggests the gains from moderation have already been exhausted.

The Data We Didn’t See

The empirical core of the editorial is an analysis showing that moderate candidates, as defined by their PAC endorsements, outperformed their presidential ticket. But is that the right way to measure the effect of moderation?

A better approach is to use measures of ideology that are more comprehensive or are directly tied to voter perceptions, and then see how candidates with different ideologies perform. For this analysis, we can use a straightforward metric: how much better or worse does a congressional candidate do compared to their party’s presidential nominee in the same district?

The result is telling. When using either the composite measure or, more importantly, the voter perception scores from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), the electoral benefit of a major ideological shift to the center is either small or statistically insignificant. The advantage provided by simply being an incumbent, by contrast, is a reliable 2-3 percentage points. In a recent research note with Jacob Grumbach that examines this question more rigorously, we find no clear electoral advantage for ideological moderation.

I was particularly disappointed not to see the CES data included in the editorial, as it measures exactly the concept—how voters perceive candidates—the piece sought to gauge. Whatever the reason for its exclusion, this data is crucial because it shows that being perceived as moderate by voters does not increase vote shares. It also challenges the claim that no progressives have won tough seats. That’s only true if you don’t count candidates like Tammy Baldwin, whom the editorial celebrates as a successful moderate but whom Wisconsin voters actually perceive as progressive. She won despite, not because of, how voters see her ideology. It fundamentally undermines the claim that only moderates win these districts.

Why Better Measures Matter

The NYT editorial is skeptical of “academic” measures of ideology, characterizing them as “messy” and producing “bizarre results.” To make this point, the article highlights cherry-picked examples where individual measures seem to miscategorize well-known politicians.

This critique, while overstated, is precisely why my recent research has focused on creating a composite measure of ideology. I solve the “noisiness” problem by combining information from over a dozen different sources—votes records, campaign donations, website text, voter assessments, and more. Importantly, none of the “bizarre” examples the editorial cites are present in the composite measure because it averages out the quirks of any single data source. It is a more robust and reliable tool and it shouldn’t be so readily dismissed.

How Many Seats Would Democrats Have Gained if They Ran Moderates in Every District?

But even if we set aside the more sophisticated measures and use the single PAC-based metric from the editorial, the case for a moderation-centric strategy falls apart. In our exchange, I ran a regression on the measures used in the editorial. It showed that being a “moderate” Democrat was associated with a modest +1.4 percentage point advantage in competitive districts, an effect that was borderline statistically insignificant.

Does this small advantage support making moderation the centerpiece of a party’s strategy? I ran a simulation to find out. If every progressive candidate on the list had been replaced by a moderate in 2024, the expected net change in Democratic seats would have been zero. The gains from this strategy, it seems, have already been tapped out.

What the Full “Scoreboard” Shows

Finally, the raw data on who wins and loses tells a story that directly challenges the editorial’s narrative. Examining Democratic performance in competitive House districts from 2016 to 2024 reveals two key facts:

1. Democrats are already running moderates in most swing districts.

2. In those same districts, progressive incumbents had higher win rates (93.3%) than their moderate counterparts (83.6%).

Looking at who lost is even more telling. The graveyard of defeated Democratic incumbents is full of moderates, not progressives—Brad Ashford, Ben McAdams, Tom O’Halleran, Susan Wild, and Max Rose, among them. Of the 22 Democratic incumbents who lost their seats between 2016 and 2024, 21 were moderates.

Perhaps most tellingly, the piece never grapples with institutional gatekeeping. The absence of progressive winners in swing districts may tell us more about who gets to run than who can win. Party committees, donors, and consultants have already decided that progressives shouldn’t compete in swing districts. But when progressive incumbents do compete in tough districts, they actually show higher success rates with their moderate counterparts.

What Is This Debate Really About?

A debate over a 1.4-point effect may seem academic. But it points to a fundamental disagreement over political strategy.

The view in the editorial is that Democrats must accept the political battlefield as it is and find messengers who can best navigate that terrain. It’s a strategy of accommodation—one that asks how to win within the constraints of a system many voters believe is fundamentally rigged.

My reading of the evidence points to a different conclusion. When the electoral gains from moderation have already been exhausted—when Democrats are already running moderates in nearly every competitive district and still losing—the task isn’t to moderate harder. It’s to give voters a reason to believe politics can deliver real change.

This requires a vision that does more than win on the margins. It requires a substantive, mobilizing agenda. I’ve proposed reframing the central conflict as Clean vs. Corrupt, an anti-corruption platform that speaks to a deep and powerful frustration among voters. A recent poll found that more Americans are ‘very worried’ about government corruption than about the cost of living or the economy.

Ultimately, this isn’t just a disagreement over data. It’s a disagreement over how tolerable the current political reality is—and how bold our strategy must be to change it. Winning the next election will be about whether Democrats will offer a vision that matches the scale of voters’ frustration with a system they increasingly see as corrupt and unresponsive. This requires a vision that does more than win on the margins with a strategy that is not clearly achieving even that.

The United States, however, has reached this moment in reverse. While aspiring autocrats typically must work to install allies on the courts after taking power, that crucial step was already complete before the second Trump administration began. The Supreme Court is not the target of a political takeover; it is instead central to facilitating one, wielding the language of constitutional interpretation and anti-discrimination to erode democratic protections.

During oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, the conservative justices framed their questions as a debate about the future of the Voting Rights Act. But their line of inquiry read more like they were exploring legal theories that could justify significantly narrowing its scope. Justice Alito framed racial gerrymandering as potentially just “partisan polarized voting.” Justice Kavanaugh suggested that remedies for racial discrimination might have a constitutional “end point.” Justice Gorsuch wondered aloud if any attempt to remedy racial discrimination was, itself, a form of discrimination. These different framings all point toward the same outcome: a system in which race-based exclusion is rebranded as race-neutral law, and the right to representation erodes beneath a veneer of constitutional reasoning.

The trajectory is clear. Shelby County v. Holder (2013) gutted the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. During oral arguments, Justice Scalia dismissed Congress’s near-unanimous reauthorization of the Act as a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” arguing that voting rights was “not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress” because it was too politically charged to be decided through normal democratic processes. Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) declared partisan gerrymandering “nonjusticiable,” giving a green light to extreme map-rigging. Brnovich v. DNC (2021) then weakened Section 2 protections against racially discriminatory election laws. Callais threatens to finish the job.

Each decision is presented as neutral jurisprudence. Each one pushes America closer to a system where a majority of votes does not reliably translate into power.

What the legal arguments obscure, the numbers make plain. As Nate Cohn notes, striking down the core of Section 2 could hand Republicans as many as a dozen additional House seats, enough to control the chamber even while losing the national popular vote by five points. It would make the United States resemble Hungary, where Orbán’s Fidesz Party has often transformed vote shares in the high 40s or low 50s into a supermajority of seats, thanks to structural bias built into the electoral architecture.

We don’t need to look abroad. Wisconsin provides a homegrown example. Aggressive gerrymandering, validated by the courts, allowed Republicans to control the state legislature for over a decade despite regularly losing the statewide popular vote. In 2018, despite winning just 45% of the statewide vote, Republicans captured 63 of 99 Assembly seats, a structural advantage so entrenched that even major Democratic wave years could not dislodge it. For years, these maps were upheld by a conservative-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court. It took liberals winning a majority on that court in 2023 for the state to begin dismantling the gerrymander.

If Callais proceeds as oral arguments suggest, majority-minority districts across the South—many of them hard-won legacies of the Civil Rights Movement—will vanish. The Congressional Black Caucus will shrink. The next House majority may be secured not by persuasion or turnout, but by a judicial decision.

Where the Court has shown the greatest deference is to power itself, culminating in the decision granting Donald Trump sweeping legal immunity for “official acts”—a ruling that defies global democratic norms, where dozens of presidents and prime ministers have been prosecuted and convicted of crimes in recent years. The Court is thus working on two fronts: shielding the leader of the anti-democratic movement from accountability while simultaneously dismantling the electoral rules that allow the majority to vote his party out.

As Harvard law professor Nikolas Bowie has argued, the Supreme Court has historically been a far more reliable obstacle to democracy than its guardian. It defended slavery in Dred Scott, validated segregation in Plessy, blessed forced sterilization in Buck v. Bell, and upheld the internment of Japanese Americans in Korematsu. Even Brown v. Board of Education—the decision most cited as evidence of the Court’s moral authority—embraced a principle of racial equality that Congress had enacted into law eighty years earlier, before the Court itself gutted those protections in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. The Warren Court’s brief era of rights expansion was among the exceptions, not the rule. Individual justices have often championed democratic values and civil rights from the bench. But as an institution, the Court’s dominant tendency has been different. The Court’s true consistency lies in its protection of property, corporate power, and wealth. Or as Bowie notes, “If you look at the history of the judicial review of federal legislation, the principal ‘minority’ most often protected by the Court is the wealthy.”

The conservative majority has learned to use anti-discrimination language as the vehicle for preserving discrimination. Justice Kavanaugh’s suggestion that remedies for racism must have an “end point” inverts the logic of the Reconstruction Amendments. They were written to empower Congress to act against racial domination, not to set an expiration date on equality. This will be the Roberts Court’s legacy: using the Constitution not to expand freedom, but to protect established hierarchies. The Court has simply found a new minority to protect—not racial or religious minorities, but a political party whose power endures through structural advantage, even when it commands fewer votes.

History offers a warning. In early nineteenth-century Britain, the Great Reform Act of 1832 emerged from a political system that had ceased to reflect the public will. Power was concentrated in “rotten boroughs”—tiny, depopulated rural districts that gave wealthy, aristocratic landowners as much parliamentary representation as entire industrial cities. Parliament’s refusal to reform those distortions produced years of crisis and mass protest; the choice eventually narrowed to reform or revolution. Britain chose reform, extending representation to the new middle class and averting political collapse.

The United States is now barreling towards its own version of this crisis. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence is creating a system of modern rotten boroughs—districts drawn and validated to preserve minority rule under the guise of constitutional neutrality. Each decision narrowing the Voting Rights Act, insulating partisan gerrymanders, or granting impunity to those in power moves the country closer to the same precipice Britain faced in 1832: a democracy hollowed out by rules designed to thwart the majority. Unlike Parliament, which could reform itself through legislation, the Court has insulated these distortions behind constitutional doctrine, making democratic correction vastly more difficult.

The Supreme Court is a judicial institution, but it is not acting like one. We should strive for the ideal—a Court bound by precedent and faithful to the constitutional project of expanding democracy. But we cannot grant it legitimacy as long as it behaves like a political institution intent on eroding civil rights and majority rule.

A democracy cannot survive permanent judicial supremacy. In the long term, Congress must reassert its constitutional powers by setting jurisdictional limits to pull crucial issues like voting rights back from a hostile judiciary, imposing term limits to lower the high-stakes partisanship of any single appointment, or expanding the bench to rebalance a Court that has been captured by one party. The Constitution vests sovereignty in “We the People,” not “We the Court.” Judicial reform is not a threat to constitutional order but rather its preservation.

Using the same methodology from my earlier analysis of DOGE layoffs—measuring agency ideology based on federal executives’ perceptions (Richardson, Clinton, & Lewis 2018)—a clear pattern emerges. During shutdowns, agencies Republicans typically oppose face devastating furlough rates: the EPA at 89%, Department of Education at 86%, the Labor Department approaching 75%. Meanwhile, security- and law-enforcement-focused agencies are largely unaffected by furloughs.

This structural imbalance transforms every budget negotiation into a tilted playing board where one side’s priorities face shutdowns while the other’s remain largely protected.

Unlike the DOGE layoffs, which were deliberately aimed at agencies aligned with Democratic priorities, shutdown furlough rules weren’t overtly crafted with partisan intent and have long been in place. But that doesn’t make them any less biased in practice.

Government shutdowns exist not through careful institutional design but by historical accident. Before 1980, funding gaps rarely brought the government to a halt; agencies usually kept operating with the expectation Congress would make them whole later. That changed when the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a series of opinions reinterpreting the Antideficiency Act, an obscure 19th-century law. Suddenly, the absence of appropriations meant most operations had to stop. There was no new statute and no grand debate in Congress. It was just some lawyer’s opinion and everyone decided to go along with it. It was a legal interpretation by the Attorney General that, over time, hardened into today’s shutdown regime.

Most other major democracies have safeguards to prevent this dysfunction. In parliamentary systems, budget impasses trigger elections or automatically extend funding. These mechanisms lower the temperature by removing the nuclear option. America, by historical accident, went the other way.

Past shutdowns reveal the pattern: Republicans extracted major deficit reduction in 2011, attempted Obamacare repeal in 2013, and border wall funding in 2018—each demand a concession beyond the status quo.

By contrast, Democrats seek nothing new in this shutdown fight, only preservation of existing healthcare funding. It’s the political equivalent of asking for your hat back after someone grabbed it.

When one party’s ideology aligns with government contraction while the other requires active government programs, shutdown threats become a loaded weapon pointing in only one direction. The mechanism rewards obstructionism and punishes those seeking to maintain, let alone expand, government services.

Good institutional design creates incentives for compromise and lowers political stakes. The shutdown mechanism achieves precisely the opposite—it raises the temperature, rewards brinkmanship, and systematically advantages those most willing to see the government cease functioning.

Until we confront the institutional rules themselves—not just the politicians wielding them—we’ll remain trapped in this cycle of manufactured crisis. We’ve stumbled into a system where threatening to burn down the house gives one side more leverage than the other. Each shutdown, each near-miss, each eleventh-hour negotiation further normalizes what should be unthinkable in a democracy: holding the basic operations of government hostage for partisan gain.

This distinction has become painfully relevant in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The debate between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates about Kirk’s legacy reveals how successfully this conflation has taken hold, even among those committed to justice.

Klein’s instinct to find common ground, to seek what can unite rather than divide, comes from a genuine place. His willingness to engage Coates in thoughtful disagreement, to platform challenging voices across the political spectrum, demonstrates his commitment to democratic dialogue. When he argues for respecting Kirk’s political methods—the willingness to engage, debate, and persuade—he’s grappling with a real strategic question: How do we win in a country where so many have chosen the other side?

But Coates identifies something crucial that this pragmatic framework can obscure. Kirk didn’t just engage in normal political disagreement; he systematically dehumanized entire groups of people. He called Haitians potential “masters” who would dominate Americans. He used slurs against trans people that Coates found too vile to repeat. This wasn’t political discourse—it was hate mobilization.

The authoritarian playbook deliberately seeks to conflate these two forms of anger. First, you normalize hate by presenting it as merely another political position deserving of debate. Then, when people express righteous anger at this dehumanization, you accuse them of being the real problem—intolerant, divisive, unwilling to engage in public discourse. The aggressor becomes the victim; the defense of human dignity becomes the attack on civil discourse.

Klein’s strategic pragmatism—suggesting pro-life Democrats run in red states, seeking compromises that might expand the coalition—has an appeal, assuming one accepts the premise that the dwindling political center remains the main electoral prize. Sometimes difficult compromises have led to better outcomes: Obama’s calculated positions on same-sex marriage arguably helped him appoint justices who advanced equality. But these compromises carry profound risks. They signal whose humanity is negotiable. They tell vulnerable people that their rights are chips to be bargained when convenient. And crucially, such compromises should never be voluntary—they should only come when all other avenues have been exhausted, not as an opening bid for hypothetical coalition expansion.

But here’s where the strategic calculation becomes self-defeating: “Bridging gaps” cannot come at the expense of key parts of your coalition feeling abandoned and without a sense of belonging. When we muse about trading away reproductive rights or soft-pedal responses to hate speech, we don’t just lose moral clarity, we lose the very people whose passion and commitment form the backbone of progressive politics. The trans kids facing violence, the immigrants branded as invaders, the women losing bodily autonomy—they need to know their party won’t trade their humanity for swing votes. And so do their families and those who love them.

My reading of the electoral math gives empirical weight that such a strategy of “shrinking the tent to expand it” will fail. And I have written about alternative strategies, in particular, anti-corruption platforms that require no such tradeoffs—messages that unite working people across demographic lines without abandoning anyone’s fundamental rights or dignity.

As Coates reminds us: “I want you to take as seriously people who are in the tent and who are vulnerable and afraid.” Movements that abandon their core supporters in pursuit of mythical moderate voters often end up with neither. The energy drains away, the activists stay home, and the authentic moral voice that might actually persuade the persuadable gets replaced by calculated positioning that convinces no one.

The path forward requires maintaining the distinction between legitimate political disagreement and the dehumanization of our fellow citizens. Not because we’re purists, but because failing to maintain this distinction is precisely how authoritarians win. They exhaust us into accepting false equivalence, into treating hate as just another viewpoint, into believing that defending human dignity is as divisive as attacking it.

Klein and Coates want the same things—a more just society, protection for the vulnerable, democratic renewal. The question is how to get there. The evidence suggests that compromising on basic humanity doesn’t broaden coalitions; it hollows them out. The work now is to find ways to expand our reach without abandoning our foundation—to bridge gaps, yes, but never at the expense of our neighbor’s humanity.

This represents a fundamental shift in how political money flows through our democracy. Twenty years ago, fundraising operations were a necessary but modest expense, like renting office space or printing yard signs. Today, it has metastasized into the primary activity of most campaigns. In 2022, 31% of total expenditures were for fundraising expenses. This came close to exceeding the 33% of total expenditures going towards advertising. If current trends hold in 2026, it’s likely that fundraising costs will for the first time exceed what is spent on advertising, thus becoming the biggest spending category.

This inefficiency is partly fueled by an arms race between the parties. While Republicans have historically spent more as a percentage on fundraising operations than Democrats, Democrats are rapidly closing the gap.

The mechanics behind growing fundraising are telling. Spending on donor lists exploded from $20 million in 2004 to $351 million in 2020 before settling at $214 million in 2024. Campaigns now pay large sums just to acquire the contact information of people they can bombard with donation requests. Once a campaign buys your name, they monetize it by reselling it to other campaigns, creating a cycle of solicitation that enriches list brokers while exhausting donors.

This data validates what every politically engaged American already knows from their overflowing inboxes and buzzing phones: the fundraising industrial complex has become a parasite on the democratic process. When nearly one-third of all political contributions get recycled back into asking for more contributions, we've created a system that exists primarily to perpetuate itself while enriching fundraising consultants.

Every dollar spent on fundraising consultants, list rentals, and SMS spammers is a dollar not spent on voter contact, organizing, or actual political communication. Campaigns that should be building movements are instead building donor databases. Political energy that could mobilize communities gets redirected into optimizing email subject lines and testing which desperate plea extracts the most dollars from exhausted supporters.

This isn't how a healthy democracy functions. When the mechanics of fundraising consume the mission of politics, when raising money becomes more important than the cause it's supposed to fund, we've lost the plot. Fundraising shouldn’t be the end goal. But it is increasingly difficult to escape the conclusion that too many candidates and party operatives have mistaken it for one.

The hunger for reform is overwhelming. Yet Democrats—uniquely positioned to lead—have failed to seize it.

The Democratic Party brand is in tatters. Even among Democratic voters, approval of party leadership has plummeted to historic lows. This creates a vicious cycle: when the brand is toxic, individual candidates distance themselves from it to survive. But every candidate who runs away further weakens the brand for everyone else, making the next cycle of distancing even more necessary.

Political strategists offer two familiar solutions to lead Democrats out of the wilderness. Some urge Democrats to move center—run moderates, soften cultural positions, appeal to swing voters. Others push left—run progressives, mobilize the base, inspire irregular voters. But academic research shows that neither approach yields significant electoral gains in contemporary elections. And neither is without tradeoffs.

The way out isn't about left versus right; it's about clean versus corrupt, reform versus a rigged system, the people versus oligarchs.

Corruption is the achilles heel of authoritarians and frequently their downfall. To truly leverage this strategy, Democrats need to demonstrate authentic commitment to self-reform. This requires cleaning up deceptive fundraising practices, breaking free from billionaire donors, and supporting popular reforms like banning congressional stock trading. Superficial adoption of anti-corruption rhetoric without genuine action would be perceived as disingenuous and undermine the entire effort.

This also addresses a critical liability: the perception that Democrats are primarily committed to returning to the status quo. The party needs to shed that image and remake itself as a genuine reform party, advocating for systemic changes that address the public's deep-seated frustrations, not merely adjusting the margins of a system many view as fundamentally unfair.

Across decades and continents, corruption has been the fatal weakness of authoritarian regimes. From Manila to Cairo, strongmen who seemed immovable were suddenly swept aside—Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, when millions revolted against his family’s kleptocracy, and Hosni Mubarak in 2011, when mass protests over corruption and cronyism ended his three-decade rule. Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity erupted when mass protests over corruption, oligarchic influence, and Yanukovych’s betrayal of EU-alignment forced his removal from power. Malaysia's seemingly unshakeable Najib Razak fell in 2018 when voters rebelled against the 1MDB scandal. In Guatemala, President Otto Pérez Molina resigned in 2015 amid the La Línea customs fraud scandal and was soon jailed on corruption charges. Bangladesh's Sheikh Hasina resigned in 2024 after student-led demonstrations against corruption. Most recently, mass protests in Nepal toppled Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli and installed former Chief Justice Sushila Karki, widely viewed as an anti-corruption reformer, as interim leader. Even in democracies, corruption scandals have toppled ruling parties, from Italy’s Tangentopoli in the 1990s to South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution in 2017, when mass protests over influence-peddling led to President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment.

This pattern holds a crucial lesson for America’s current moment. As democratic norms erode and elections become increasingly tilted, anti-corruption movements offer what partisan politics cannot: the moral authority to unite society against a rigged system. When traditional opposition fails, these movements succeed because they transcend party lines, mobilizing citizens around a cause larger than any candidate: the fundamental fairness of the system itself.

Research shows that in polarized societies, the most effective opposition doesn’t fight on the traditional left-right battlefield where positions are entrenched. Instead, it creates an entirely new axis of conflict.1 Framing the stakes as clean versus corrupt shifts debate from rigid ideological divisions to a universally resonant moral question: are you on the side of the people or a corrupt elite?

Moderation and bipartisanship, the strategy the Democratic leadership appears to have settled on, requires abandoning core constituencies—softening on civil rights to appeal to conservatives, or muting economic populism to satisfy donors. These compromises risk fracturing the coalition the party needs to win.

An anti-corruption platform demands no such tradeoffs. It unites disparate groups around a shared grievance: the belief that the system is rigged against ordinary people. It speaks to the progressive who sees corporate money corrupting climate policy and stagnating wages, the suburban moderate disgusted by congressional insider trading, and even the disillusioned conservative who believes Washington has been captured by special interests. Each group brings specific concerns, but all share the conviction that powerful elites are gaming the system at everyone's expense.

This creates a fundamentally different kind of politics. Rather than positioning themselves as competent managers of a broken system, anti-corruption messaging repositions Democrats as the only political party truly committed to reforming the system.

Republicans have made this almost too easy. Trump accepts $400 million planes from foreign governments while making billions from shady crypto schemes. Cabinet positions go to mega-donors. Untold millions flow into his businesses from foreign governments. Conservative Supreme Court justices accept luxury vacations from billionaires with cases before the court. It’s no surprise that when pollsters ask voters to describe the Republican Party, the most common response is “corrupt.”

Yet Democrats can’t capitalize on this vulnerability because they lack credibility. When party leaders condemn big money while courting billionaires to fund their Super PACs, when they decry corporate influence while taking millions from industries they regulate, voters see hypocrisy.

Most voters don't differentiate between large campaign donations and outright bribes. While legally distinct, in public opinion, they're functionally the same. Voters see a system where wealth buys access and influence, and they're not wrong.

The conventional wisdom insists Democrats need big money to compete. This is demonstrably false. As I’ve detailed elsewhere, Democrats have structural advantages they’re failing to leverage: Republicans depend on mega-donors for 56% of their funding versus only 18% for Democrats. Democrats maintain robust support from small and mid-sized donors, fueled by professionals and overwhelming support from younger generations—an advantage they are arguably squandering.

Moreover, the big money Democrats chase primarily funds campaign ads—perhaps the most overrated tool in politics. A large meta-analysis of 49 field experiments found campaign ads barely move vote shares, if at all. My own research analyzing 1.2 million precinct-level results showed that doubling an opponent’s Super PAC spending shifts votes by a mere 0.02%. Yet consultants have built an empire convincing candidates otherwise.

Campaign ads are the snake oil of politics: expensive cure-alls, backed by faith rather than evidence, peddled by consultants who profit whether the remedy works or not. The result is a perpetual fundraising machine where candidates become endless fundraisers, degrading themselves with pitches that would make infomercial hosts cringe. The only difference is that snake oil salesmen eventually had to leave town.

Every time Democrats take corporate PAC money or court billionaire donors, they validate the “all politicians are the same” narrative and surrender the moral authority to attack corruption. The party that proves it’s not for sale—through action, not rhetoric—will gain enormous political advantage. But this requires genuine sacrifice and self-reform.

Democrats stand at a crossroads. They can continue tweaking messages, chasing a dwindling population of swing voters, while positioning themselves as the defender of a system voters fundamentally distrust. Or they can seize the moment and build a brand candidates will be proud to run on, not away from.

The corruption of the Trump era has handed them the perfect opening. But this opportunity has a price—the party must reform itself first, making costly sacrifices that prove their commitment is real.

If Democrats have the courage to clean house, reject big money, and become the authentic voice of systemic reform, they won't only win elections—they'll restore faith in democratic governance that legalized corruption has nearly destroyed. The choice is theirs: remain complicit in a broken system, or lead the fight to fix it. There is no middle ground. Either Democrats lead the fight to clean up the system or they will be remembered as complicit in its collapse.

It's the same question people ask about Nigerian prince emails and tech support scams. The answer, it turns out, is the same. These tactics aren't designed to fool everyone. They're designed to target and exploit vulnerable populations, particularly elderly Americans. Just as online scammers deliberately include obvious red flags to filter out skeptical recipients, political spam operations use over-the-top emotional manipulation to find donors who will respond to increasingly aggressive tactics.

This is an important question because the answer informs our understanding of the problem at hand and what solutions are viable. Are the donors to these spam PACs just like any other political donors, or are they systematically different? I calculated the age of donors giving to these spam PACs, and the figure below compares their age distribution with that of ActBlue donors who gave directly to presidential campaigns.

What the data reveals is troubling: these spam PACs are part of a system engineered to target and extract money from seniors.

My analysis of the FEC filings in "The Mothership Vortex" established that the "necessary evil" defense for spam PACs is nonsense. At least the “necessary” part is. What's been pitched as a grassroots fundraising movement looks a lot like a large-scale operation that has imported the tactics of elder financial fraud.

These deceptive tactics can be seen in the fundraising records of party committees and candidates who make use of them. For reference, I’ve included three prominent candidates whose fundraising frequently and relentlessly employ deceptive fundraising tactics: Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY); and Suzan DelBene (D-WA), the current chair of the DCCC. (You can see an archive of their fundraising emails at politicalemails.org).

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and other official party organs have adopted the same tactics. When the party's own campaign committees send all-caps texts and emails claiming nonexistent "400% matches” or manufactured deadlines, they legitimize and normalize the exploitation.

Mothership’s aggressive fundraising tactics have been described as “churn and burn,” but a more apt description is “hook and squeeze.” Most of their donations are coming from individuals who donate 10 or more times to spam PACs. Spam PACs have raised an astounding amount of money, but when you dig into the data, you find that a staggering $540 million of that raised since 2020 has come from this group of captivated donors.

Consider just a few of the many extreme cases:

• An 89-year-old woman from Indianapolis has made 7,532 separate donations totaling $68,666. That's an average of over 10 donations per day, every day, for more than two years.

• An 84-year-old man from Oxford, Ohio, has given $194,322 through 2,271 individual transactions. He is not employed and likely retired.

• A 79-year-old woman in Missoula, Montana, made 3,177 separate donations.

• An 80-year-old man in Niceville, Florida, was solicited 2,793 times for over $100,000.

Worse still, these seniors don’t look to be wealthy. Public records show the donors profiled here live in homes valued between $300,000 and $500,000, and are located in rural areas or middle-class neighborhoods. This suggests it is a substantial financial burden on these seniors and their families.

Up until this point, I had been operating under the assumption that the bizarre messaging generated by Mothership was the sad result of a long series of A/B tested messages, slowly evolving into language that appears unhinged but is weirdly effective at scale. Now having read up on scams targeting seniors, I no longer believe that some algorithm wandered upon these tried and true scamming tactics.

The tactics employed by spam PACs share similarities with those used by financial scammers who have targeted seniors for decades. The Federal Trade Commission, AARP, and state attorneys general have spent years documenting and combating these tactics.

Political parties around the world have relied on many different ways for funding. They have relied on special interests, party membership fees, and public financing. In some corners of the world, they’ve even been funded by drug cartels. But I am unaware of another example, outside the United States, where political parties have resorted to a model built on exploiting seniors.

The complicity of official party committees makes this particularly frustrating. When the DCCC and DSCC employ the same deceptive tactics as the most exploitative spam PACs, they provide cover for the entire ecosystem. They signal that deceiving elderly donors is sanctioned behavior, no matter how dishonest and unethical.

The party needs to rethink its fundraising philosophy. This isn't sustainable politically or ethically.

The power to stop this rests squarely with party leadership. If Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, or Ken Martin want to clean up this mess, there are concrete steps they can take right now.

First, they can publicly and forcefully back the new rules put in place by ActBlue. In August of 2025, ActBlue updated its policies to explicitly prohibit "aggressive, unethical, or deceptive fundraising behavior that abuses donor trust". These rules give the platform grounds to deplatform PACs and candidates who use misleading solicitations. A strong statement of support from party leadership would not only amplify these rules but also send a clear message to all fundraising vendors that the era of exploiting donors is over. Public backing would also empower ActBlue to enforce its policies more aggressively, knowing they have the support of the party establishment. Currently, the silence from the party leadership signals the opposite.

Second, party leaders can and should blocklist vendors who engage in these predatory tactics. The Democratic campaign committees, such as the DCCC, have a history of creating blocklists for vendors who work with primary challengers to incumbents. While that policy was controversial, it proves that the infrastructure for holding vendors accountable already exists. It is time to repurpose that tool for a more ethical cause: protecting elderly and vulnerable donors from financial exploitation. If a vendor is found to be using deceptive practices, they should be barred from working with any and all Democratic campaigns. This would create a powerful financial incentive for vendors to clean up their act and would quickly starve the most egregious offenders of the revenue they need to operate.

This would be such an easy win for the party. Voters hate the spam but not half as much as donors do. Not only do spam PACs not contribute to the party’s finances, the use of these deceptive fundraising tactics by spam PACs and candidates and party committees alike has turned a huge segment of supporters off from ever donating again.

Political movements require funding, but they also require trust. Every dollar extracted through deception erodes that trust—not just with that individual, but with their families and communities who witness the exploitation. When adult children discover their parents have been drained by political fundraising operations using tactics reminiscent of common internet scams—but bearing the brand of the Democratic Party itself—the damage extends far beyond the financial.

The numbers are clear. The targeting is deliberate. The reform path is obvious. What remains is the political will to protect the very supporters who built the progressive infrastructure these consultants now profit from. They deserve better than to have their political engagement reduced to a series of increasingly desperate text messages designed to separate them from their savings. And we deserve better than a party leadership that lets this happen.

____

Table 1: Tactical Parallels Between "Spam PAC" Fundraising and Common Financial Scams

Today the CES released its voter validated weights. The updated CES crosschecks voter registration lists to check if survey respondents are actually voters or non-voters. As we said in our earlier piece, we’d update our findings with this new CES update. Specifically, we said we would replicate our analysis using the voter validated weights once they were released.

In the figure below, that is the analysis using voter validated or “VVWeights.” That is, our preregistered replication analysis—using the same code that we wrote back in April—finds that non-voters leaned Harris over Trump, consistent with what we found in our earlier analyses.1 A benefit of these voter validated weights is that we know that these are non-voters, since they are Americans who were successfully matched to government voter registration lists and were confirmed to have not turned out to vote. Furthermore, these survey weights are calculated to create a demographically representative sample of US adults.

However, if we also include all individuals who were not successfully matched to voter registration lists and make the (plausible) assumption that they did not vote, then Trump edges out Harris among non-voters. This is the bar that says “CommonWeight.” This means we might be accidentally assuming some voters are non-voters, since there are other reasons that somebody might not be successfully matched to a voter registration list (such as changing or misspelling a name). On the other hand, it gives us a larger sample size if we include all of these unmatched individuals as non-voters.

There are three takeaways here. First, it’s reasonable to believe that non-voters leaned Trump over Harris in 2024. Second, if we take the CommonWeight estimate as correct, then it is very close to the Pew survey estimate of non-voters, but still very far off from the more aggressive public claims of non-voters being Trump +11 or more.

Third, this is still a highly uncertain question. As we described in earlier pieces, it’s incredibly difficult to survey non-voters; if they were easy to track down and ask about their political attitudes, they’d be voters. This means that survey samples of non-voters are much less certain than survey samples of voters. This sampling uncertainty goes beyond regular statistical uncertainty we see in confidence intervals (for reference, our bootstrapped confidence interval here for the Trump support estimate using CommonWeight is about 2 percentage-points in size).

But beyond that, the fact that different weights—VVWeight vs. CommonWeight—give distinct answers to this question highlight the tough modeling choices that analysts must make, and the way that these choices may impact results.

Do moderate candidates perform better in general elections? Lakshya Jain and Harrison Lavelle of the political consulting firm Split Ticket say yes, “moderation is winning.”

Their argument rests on a proprietary metric they call “Wins Above Replacement” (WAR), which has become famous in Democratic Party circles. Split Ticket’s Jain gave a presentation on the WAR metric at WelcomeFest 2025, touted as “the largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.”

The idea sounds smart and comes wrapped in the authority of data. But is the data any good?

This week, G. Elliott Morris, in his newsletter Strength in Numbers, published his own analysis of the WAR metric. It was a welcome piece of scrutiny, because we were in the middle of our own deep dive into the same question. It's always a good sign when independent researchers digging into the same problem start to arrive at the same place. And our findings are very similar to his.

The takeaway from both analyses: the claim that moderation provides a major electoral boost is built on a statistical illusion. Split Ticket’s WAR isn’t the neutral measure of candidate skill it claims to be. It’s a biased metric, constructed in a way that makes moderates look good and progressives look bad.

The Two Big Problems

The case for moderation built on Split Ticket's WAR metric has two fundamental flaws. First, Split Ticket’s WAR itself is a biased measure that is engineered to favor moderates. Second, they use this already-biased metric in flawed analyses that confuse correlation with causation.

Problem 1: A Biased Measure

Let's start with the biased metric.

In political science, we have gold-standard tools for measuring the effect of a candidate's ideology. When we use these rigorous methods, we find that the electoral benefit of being a moderate is small to nonexistent in the modern era. So, the first question is: why does Split Ticket’s model find such a large effect when others don't?

The answer lies in how they construct their WAR scores.

To understand a candidate's performance, you need a baseline. The most common and intuitive one is simple: How did the congressional candidate do compared to their party's presidential candidate in the same district?

Because Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are on the ballot in every district, this creates a common yardstick. If a Democrat runs 5 points ahead of Harris in her district, she’s a strong candidate. If she runs 5 points behind, she’s a weak one. This baseline isn't perfect, but it's a straightforward way to start comparing candidates across the country.

But that’s not what Split Ticket does. They start with a baseline like this, but then they add a special, proprietary "adjustment." They argue this adjustment is necessary to account for factors like incumbency. There's a standard, transparent way to account for incumbency: you use it as a control variable in a regression. That's Statistics 101. Instead, they’ve built it into the adjustment that gets added to the score. While not inherently wrong, this approach can lead to bad conclusions if the adjustment itself is biased. To truly isolate a candidate's skill, you need to account for other factors that shape an election. The impulse to adjust the baseline is the right one. The problem is in how you do it.

For illustration, let's take the most obvious example: incumbency. Everyone knows that incumbents have a massive built-in advantage. They have name recognition, fundraising networks, and a long record of constituent service.

Now, let's say two things are true at the same time:

1. Incumbents, on average, get a 3-point electoral bump just for being incumbents.

2. Incumbents also happen to be, on average, more moderate than challengers.

If you create a model that doesn't properly separate these two facts, you will mistakenly give credit to "moderation" for the 3-point bump that was actually caused by "incumbency." We’re using the example of incumbency for clarity; this specific example doesn’t apply to the Split Ticket model. But you can substitute incumbency for any other factor that could potentially differentiate candidates—things we can see, like being from a small state, and things we can’t see, like the underlying ‘vibes’ of a district when a candidate decides to run—and see the problem.

Think of it this way: Split Ticket's formula looks like this:
WAR = (Candidate Vote Share - Presidential Vote Share) + Adjustments

Those "adjustments" should be neutral—they should help us understand candidate quality regardless of ideology. But they're not neutral. They're thumb on the scale for moderates.

We tested this directly. In 2024, when you use the simple metric—how Democrats performed compared to Kamala Harris—moderates and progressives did essentially the same. But after Split Ticket applies their adjustments, suddenly moderates appear to outperform progressives by sizable margins.

Another example is how Split Ticket’s WAR treats long-term Democratic incumbents from small states. The model essentially says: "These candidates keep winning, so they must be incredibly talented (and differences in talent are due to moderation)." But there's another explanation: They're incumbents with established brands in states where personal relationships—especially those relationships created many years ago, before the state realigned to the GOP—matter more than party labels.

Zooming out, these modeling choices from Split Ticket are pretty arbitrary, but they have major ramifications for WAR scores.

Split Ticket’s WAR Scores Are Surprisingly Unrelated to Candidate Electoral Performance

The adjustments in Split Ticket’s WAR model make the measure surprisingly unrelated to the intuitive metric of candidate performance that we mentioned earlier: How did the congressional candidate do compared to their party's presidential candidate in the same district? Statistically, this is defined as (congressional vote share - presidential vote share) for a district. We’ll call this “Votes Compared to Presidential Candidate.” For Democrats in 2024, this translates into how well a candidate does in their district compared to Kamala Harris.

The correlation between WAR and Votes Compared to Presidential Candidate is only 0.56. That means that less than a third of Split Ticket’s WAR measure is explained by how well a candidate does compared to their copartisan presidential nominee.1 There is clearly a lot more going on in the WAR measure than how well a candidate does in their election. This gives Split Ticket a ton of leeway to stack the deck in favor of moderates in their WAR metric. Our own WAR measure, BG-WAR, is much more related to Votes Compared to Presidential Candidate. We’ll return to our own BG-WAR metric and its construction in the next section.

Building a Better Model: How BG-WAR Wins on Prediction

We built our own WAR model to create a fairer measure of candidate quality. To build our model, which we call BG-WAR, we used a machine learning method called a glmnet. It's a powerful machine learning model and a standard tool for prediction.

An important difference is how we tested our model. We used a strict out-of-sample validation process.2

Judged by the standard of predictive power, our BG-WAR model is vastly superior. Our transparent, out-of-sample model explains 92% of the variation in congressional vote shares.

By their own stated criteria their model does much worse. A transparent, rigorously tested model shows that nearly all of the variation in election results can be predicted by fundamentals, leaving little room for a supposed "moderation bonus."

So what happens when we replace the biased WAR model with a more predictive model?

Split Ticket’s biased WAR measure suggests that moderates are expected to get about 7 percentage-points higher vote shares than progressives. That’s a lot!

But what does the more predictive BG-WAR say? We find that moderates receive about no vote share advantage relative to progressives.3 This is more in line with G. Elliott Morris’s WAR measure, which finds that moderates outperform progressives by 1 to 1.5 percentage points. Split Ticket’s WAR is the serious outlier here—with results many times larger than ours and Morris’s. You can see the results in the figures below.4

Figure 1: The Relationship between Moderation and Split Ticket’s WAR (2024 Dems)

Figure 2: The Relationship between Moderation and BG-WAR (2024 Dems)

Problem 2: WAR Scores Don’t Separate Correlation from Causation

So far, we’ve addressed the first problem with Split Ticket’s WAR—that it stacks the deck in favor of moderates. But there’s an even bigger problem. Split Ticket confuses correlation as causation in its analyses of progressive and moderate candidates. Split Ticket finds that moderates have higher WAR scores than progressives, a correlation. But Split Ticket interprets this as causal evidence that running more moderates “will win more elections.”

Split Ticket’s logic is like saying all baseball players should change their names to Aaron Judge because he has the highest WAR score. It confuses correlation with causation in the most basic way possible.

In baseball, Aaron Judge’s high WAR tells teams he’s valuable. But WAR doesn’t tell you why he’s good—it doesn’t mean other players would do better by copying Judge’s batting stance. Popsicle consumption and sunburns are correlated, but popsicles do not cause sunburns. Similarly, moderate Democrats having higher average WAR scores doesn’t mean progressive candidates should become moderate.

This becomes even clearer when you consider Joe Manchin, who tops WAR rankings. Manchin deserves his high WAR score, having won as a Democrat in deep-red West Virginia. But his success came from decades of building a unique personal brand, starting when West Virginia was still a Democratic state. His moderation was credible to voters in a way that a replacement Democrat’s wouldn’t be—even a replacement with the same exact ideology. The crushing defeat of Glenn Elliott, another Democratic moderate, in 2024 demonstrates this point perfectly. Split Ticket’s WAR analyses, however, interpret Manchin’s success as driven by moderation, ignoring alternative explanations.

The Survivorship Bias Problem

Split Ticket’s analyses suffer from another source of bias. There’s a famous story from World War II about planes returning from combat with bullet holes. Military analysts initially wanted to reinforce the areas with the most holes. But they had it backwards—the planes that returned were hit in areas where they could survive. The planes that didn’t return were hit elsewhere.

Split Ticket makes the same error. In their moderation analyses, they only look at incumbents—the planes that returned to base—not those who challenged and lost despite being moderate. This is textbook survivorship bias.5

Consider how many moderate Democrats have lost in recent years while Trump-aligned Republicans won with deeply unpopular policy positions focused on tax cuts for the rich and eliminating healthcare protections. The Republican Party’s electoral success despite having one of the least popular policy agendas ever recorded suggests that traditional left-right policy and ideology aren’t driving election results.

What Political Science Shows

Academic social science disciplines like economics and political science are obsessed with separating correlation from causation. This gives us a big advantage. Two key social science approaches to separating correlation from causation are:

1. Regression discontinuity design: We look at very close primaries between moderates and progressives where the winner is essentially random, then see if moderate nominees do better in the general election.

2. Difference-in-differences: We examine whether moderate candidates outperform progressives in the same district over time, controlling for national trends.

Our working paper, “The Electoral Effects of Candidate Ideology in the Trump Era,” uses these methods. The finding? No effect of ideology in either direction. When you properly separate correlation from causation, the supposed advantage of moderation vanishes.6

Another working paper from one of us (Bonica), along with coauthors Kasey Rhee and Nicolas Studen, finds small and precise effects of moderation on electoral performance. The paper, “The Electoral Consequences of Ideological Persuasion: Evidence from a Within-Precinct Analysis of U.S. Elections,” separates correlation from causation using a ‘within-precinct design’ that tests whether more moderate candidates get more votes from voters within the same precinct as more extreme leftwing or rightwing candidates.

The small to nonexistent effects of moderation in the modern era shouldn’t be surprising. Decades ago when “all politics was local,” a candidate’s moderation likely carried significant benefits. In the Trump era, by contrast, elections are driven by national tides, candidate charisma, and anti-establishment credibility—qualities that neither political consultants nor academics know how to manufacture. The difference is that we think it’s important to face that political uncertainty head on.

Why This Matters

Split Ticket’s flawed analysis isn’t just an academic concern. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, they argued that progressive Democrats are hurting the party’s chances. Split Ticket’s analyses have an aura of quantitative sophistication that make them seem credible.

But their own metric doesn’t support this conclusion. It’s built on biased measurement, uses flawed statistical methods, and ignores basic principles of causal inference. When we correct these problems using Split Ticket’s own stated criteria, the massive pro-moderation effect disappears entirely.

3

The Good News: ActBlue Announces Changes

ActBlue announced significant policy changes, including requirements for matching program verification and stronger standards against impersonation. These look like good-faith reforms. When platforms take concrete steps to address predatory tactics, we should applaud and encourage the change.

What I Learned from the Response

Mothership Strategies is apparently well-known in DC circles as the epicenter of spam fundraising. Numerous insiders reached out saying they’ve been raising these concerns for years. As someone outside the Beltway, I found it telling that anyone I could have asked would have pointed straight to Mothership.

A Note on the Numbers

Some inquired about the 1.6% efficiency rate. To clarify, I note in the article that there are additional expenditures which could be legitimate. But I don’t know. So I only reported what I could verify via the data in FEC filings. A very generous interpretation might put the efficiency rate at 10-20% (still terrible). However, when PACs build their model on deception, it’s their job to prove their spending serves a legitimate purpose, not mine to assume it does.

(Also, as someone who believes in transparency, alongside the original article I made my code public so that it’s clear exactly how I got to those numbers.)

The Problem is Bigger Than One Firm

Several PACs reached out to distance themselves from Mothership. The House Majority PAC, for instance, noted they haven’t used the firm in several years—which checks out from the data. I’ve heard that even End Citizens United, which was founded by Mothership’s principals specifically to be a client for their firm, has since distanced themselves.

But here’s the thing: they’re still employing the same predatory tactics. Their recent fundraising emails violate almost every one of ActBlue’s new policies that take effect August 20. They might not use Mothership anymore, but the spam fundraising playbook remains unchanged. Other firms appear to be providing similar services. (I’m looking into this more.) The rot runs deeper than any single bad actor.

What Happens Next

I’m not a journalist; I’m a political scientist. I’m not trained to do investigative reporting. But actual journalists should. The response to this piece shows there’s much more to uncover about how Democratic fundraising became a self-enrichment scheme disguised as political activism. (I’ll continue my research in this area.)

One Telling Silence

I’ve heard from numerous groups since publishing—PACs defending themselves, DC insiders telling me that things are worse than they look, donors sharing their experiences. But there’s one notable silence: I’ve heard absolutely nothing from the DCCC, DSCC, or DNC. Not a word.

These are the official national party committees whose former staff founded Mothership and who benefit from the trickle of funds that actually escape the vortex. They have the power to set standards for the entire Democratic fundraising ecosystem.

The problem is bigger than Mothership. But until the party’s own campaign committees are willing to even acknowledge the problem, let alone address it, the extraction will continue.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it's a necessary evil—that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises.

We all have that one obscure skill we’ve inadvertently maxed out. Mine happens to be navigating the labyrinth of campaign finance data. So, after documenting the spam tactics in a previous article, I told myself I’d just take a quick look to see who was behind them and where the money was going.

That "quick look" immediately pulled me in. The illusion of a sprawling grassroots movement, with its dozens of different PAC names, quickly gave way to a much simpler and more alarming reality. It only required pulling on a single thread—tracing who a few of the most aggressive PACs were paying—to watch their entire manufactured world unravel. What emerged was not a diverse network of activists, but a concentrated ecosystem built to serve the firm at its center: Mothership Strategies.

(A repo with all the code needed to replicate this analysis is available for download here. A data visualization of the findings is at the bottom of this post.)

From Party Insiders to Extraction Engineers

To understand Mothership's central role, one must understand its origins. The firm was founded in 2014 by senior alumni of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC): its former digital director, Greg Berlin, and deputy digital director, Charles Starnes. During their tenure at the DCCC, they helped pioneer the fundraising model that now dominates Democratic inboxes—a high-volume strategy that relies on emotionally charged, often hyperbolic appeals to compel immediate donations. This model, sometimes called "churn and burn," prioritizes short-term revenue over long-term donor relationships.

After leaving the DCCC, Berlin and Starnes effectively privatized this playbook, building a business around the party's most aggressive tactics and turning an internal strategy into a fundraising powerhouse for the Democratic Party—or so it might seem on the surface.

They became the operational heart of a sprawling nexus of interconnected political action committees, many of which they helped create and which now serve as their primary clients. These are not a diverse collection of grassroots groups; they are a tightly integrated network that functions primarily to funnel funds to Mothership. Their names are likely familiar from the very texts and emails that flood inboxes: Progressive Turnout Project, Stop Republicans, and End Citizens United to name a few.

The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing. The most glaring example is End Citizens United. In 2015, just one year after founding their consulting firm, Mothership principals Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes also co-founded this PAC. It quickly became one of their largest and most reliable clients, a perfect circle of revenue generation that blurs the line between vendor and client.

Follow the Money

The core defense of these aggressive fundraising tactics rests on a single claim: they are brutally effective. The FEC data proves this is a fallacy. An examination of the money flowing through the Mothership network reveals a system designed not for political impact, but for enriching the consultants who operate it.

To understand the scale of this operation, consider the total amount raised. Since 2018, this core network of Mothership-linked PACs has raised approximately $678 million from individual donors. (This number excludes money raised by the firm's other clients, like candidate campaigns, focusing specifically on the interconnected PACs at the heart of this system.) Of that total fundraising haul, $159 million was paid directly to Mothership Strategies for consulting fees, accounting for the majority of the $282 million Mothership has been paid by all its clients combined.

But the firm's direct cut is only part of the story. The "churn and burn" fundraising model is immensely expensive to operate. Sending millions of texts and emails requires massive spending on digital infrastructure. For instance, FEC filings show this network paid $22.5 million to a single vendor, Message Digital LLC, a firm that specializes in text message delivery.

The remaining hundreds of millions disappeared into a maze of self-reported categories: $150 million to consulting/fundraising, $70 million to salaries and payroll. There are some disbursements to what seem to be legitimate advocacy and organizing–for instance Progressive Turnout Project reports paying Shawmut Services $19 million for canvassing. However, most of the unclassifiable expenditures appear to be administrative costs or media buys that feed back into the fundraising machine itself.

How much of the money raised by these groups actually makes it to candidates and party committees?

After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network's FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.

But here's the number that should end all debate:

This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.

Here's what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she's saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns.

Why the Party Looks the Other Way

This parasitic ecosystem could not thrive without the tacit approval of the Democratic establishment. The relationship between the Mothership network and the official party is not adversarial; it is deeply symbiotic.

The firm's founders are, as noted, alumni of the DCCC. They didn't just bring their contacts; they brought the "churn and burn" playbook, which was developed and honed inside the party's own campaign arm. They simply privatized the party's dirtiest tactics. This is not a rogue operation; it is an outgrowth.

While the network keeps most of the money it raises, it maintains the relationship by funneling a small portion back to the party's central committees. Of the paltry $11 million that makes it to campaigns, approximately half goes to the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC. This provides the party with a trickle of revenue and plausible deniability, allowing it to benefit from the fundraising without taking direct responsibility for the deceptive tactics. In return, the network gains a veneer of official legitimacy.

The infection runs deep. The firm's client list extends far beyond the PAC network to include the party's own heavyweights, like the House Majority PAC, and high-profile, establishment-backed candidates such as former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison. The distinction between the party and this network dissolves with one final fact: the Democratic establishment itself is a client, actively hiring the firm at the heart of the vortex.

The Democratic Party Must Clean House

The evidence from federal election filings permits only one conclusion: the “necessary evil” defense is a lie. A fundraising model with a 1.6% efficiency rate is not a pragmatic fundraising strategy.

The financial waste, staggering as it is, pales beside the deeper damage. Every fabricated deadline, every manipulative text, every email screaming that democracy will end without your $15—each one burns through something more valuable than money: trust. The party that claims to defend democracy is systematically deceiving the very people who believe in it most.

None of this, as far as I can tell, is illegal. But since when is legality the bar? The question isn’t whether the party can tolerate this parasitic ecosystem. It’s whether it should. And the data screams the answer: when consultants pocket $282 million, it reveals a system working exactly as designed—just not for Democrats.

The prescription is simple. Cut ties with firms and any vendors that they do business with that treat donors as marks. Establish and enforce efficiency standards. Demand that fundraising operations deliver actual value to campaigns, not just commissions to consultants.

Most crucially: Recognize that Democratic donors deserve the same honesty the party demands from everyone else.

The party faces a choice. Continue feeding the vortex, or shut it down. Continue enriching consultants who’ve perverted its message, or reclaim its integrity. Continue treating supporters as ATMs, or start treating them as partners.

A party that prides itself on taking the high road doesn’t get to make exceptions for its own fundraising. Not when the cost is this clear. Not when the damage is this deep.

The numbers don’t lie. The Mothership vortex has consumed enough.

Shut it down.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The most valuable asset a political party possesses is its brand. In the relentless pursuit of online donations, the Democratic Party is systematically destroying its own.

The evidence arrives daily. I received a text recently, its senders claiming they were “close to tears.” This wasn't a message from a friend in need. It was from a Democratic fundraising operation, claiming emotional devastation because “NO ONE is donating.” The same outfit had messaged me earlier—"not mad, just disappointed."

After the 2024 election, I wrote for MSNBC about how the Democratic fundraising machine's manipulative, high-urgency tactics were damaging the party. I had hoped that consultants and campaigns might recognize that treating supporters like ATMs was counterproductive.

That hope, unsurprisingly, was misplaced. The tactics have now breached email spam folders and infected text messages. We're 464 days from the midterm elections, and my phone already buzzes with digital fundraising pleas. Based on current patterns, next year will bring an exponential increase.

I've documented several categories of modern political texts. Recognizing these patterns makes them easier to call out.

I've redacted most candidate names because this reflects a systemic problem within the Democratic Party—a symptom of prioritizing short-term revenue over long-term trust.

Exhibit 1: The ALL-CAPS for Cash

These are the garden variety unhinged type of messages. "EVERYONE is signing to STOP Trump's plan to defund NPR," one announces, claiming "Senate votes in 2 hrs & your name is missing." Another warns of Ken Burns's "EARTH-SHATTERING" statement about public broadcasting. A third simply shouts: "CORY BOOKER: FILIBUSTERS!!"

The goal is to startle, not inform. Picture someone bursting into your living room, shouting about an emergency, then holding out a collection plate before vanishing.

Exhibit 2: Emotional Extortion

The most manipulative texts weaponize emotions to extract donations. The "We're close to tears" message I received is a masterpiece of calculated pathos. The progression is textbook manipulation: first claiming "EVERYONE" is participating except me, then switching to "not mad, just disappointed," before finally collapsing into theatrical despair because "NO ONE is donating.

If you're wondering who would possibly fall for such transparently over-the-top tactics, there's a disturbing answer. As a CNN investigation revealed, these tactics often prey on elderly donors, particularly those experiencing cognitive decline. The tearful pleas and disappointment aren't just annoying—they're designed to exploit vulnerable individuals who may not fully recognize the manipulation at play.

These aren't accidental victims of overzealous marketing. They're the intended marks. The fundraising consultants who design these campaigns know exactly who responds to messages about being 'disappointed' or 'close to tears'—lonely seniors checking their phones, retirees who grew up trusting political institutions, people whose cognitive defenses have weakened with age. The operatives craft their appeals accordingly, building entire strategies around exploiting this vulnerability. They've turned elder abuse into a business model.

Exhibit 3: The Phantom 4X Match

The Democratic Party's official national campaign committees have become leading practitioners of deceptive tactics.

The "Phantom Match" is their signature deception. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) will announce a "HIGHEST-EVER 400% Match," often invoking Barack Obama for legitimacy. It’s an enticing offer that is also a complete fabrication. Let’s be clear: these matches don’t exist. There is no secret vault of wealthy donor money waiting to be “unlocked” by your small-dollar gift. If such a fund did exist, it would probably violate federal campaign finance laws. It’s a marketing gimmick designed to create a casino-like sense of value and urgency.

But the deception runs deeper than fake matches. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC) has also adopted the tactics of the very grifters they should be condemning. I received a text with clickbait-style questions: 'Tell us right now: Do you approve of Donald Trump?' The link doesn't lead to a genuine poll but to an official DSCC webpage designed to harvest personal information. The same page warns: 'To maintain the integrity of our data, please do not share this personalized link with anyone.' (As someone who's spent their career working with data, I've complied with their request—though their definition of 'integrity' appears to differ from mine.)

Party leadership has normalized this degradation. Now that I no longer get constant messages from Nancy Pelosi that make me concerned she might have fallen down a well and needs help, a new generation of party leaders have stepped up to show that they too are not above debasing themselves to raise a buck.

Suzan DelBene, chair of House Democrats' campaign arm, sends texts screaming "This is HUGE! I need you to see >>" Don’t worry—it wasn’t huge. It was just a donation landing page. Pure bait and switch.

These leaders have surrendered their names and reputations to fundraising consultants running an eternal going-out-of-business sale.

Exhibit 4: Performative Fundraising

Some campaigns have turned politics into poorly written fiction. One Senate candidate claimed that hours after launching his campaign, the President issued an "official order to take down ActBlue in a desperate attempt to destroy my chances." According to this text, Donald Trump was so threatened by an unknown candidate that he immediately attempted to shut down the entire Democratic fundraising infrastructure.

A related tactic converts personal attacks into immediate revenue opportunities. The script is predictable: a Republican insults a Democrat, and within hours that insult becomes a fundraising hook. One senator texted me to report being called a "shill" by Elon Musk. The message opened with righteous indignation about the accusation, detailed his military service and personal sacrifices, then concluded with… a request for money.

Worse still is the commodification of political courage. The moment a Democrat does something noteworthy, the fundraising apparatus kicks into high gear. Nothing is allowed to exist for its own sake; every moment of authentic leadership must be immediately converted into a donation appeal.

Why This Is So Damaging

A disturbing question hangs over modern political fundraising: when did deceiving supporters for contributions become acceptable? According to industry insiders, the practice of fake donation matching—a tactic that would violate campaign finance laws if real—has become so normalized that fundraising consultants openly acknowledge "nobody is actually matching anything." Yet campaigns demand its use anyway.

Consider how abnormal this behavior is. Costco doesn't text daily claiming they're "close to tears" because I haven't renewed my membership. Netflix doesn't scream "STREAMING EMERGENCY!!" at 6 AM. Amazon doesn't claim Jeff Bezos is personally devastated by shopping cart abandonment. Only political campaigns and fraudulent charities communicate this way.

This is more than just a marketing failure; it is a failure of political leadership. A party that claims to champion consumer protection in public policy employs deceptive, bait-and-switch tactics in its own communications. A party that purports to protect the vulnerable builds fundraising models that prey upon them.

This constant barrage has consequences. The cumulative effect creates a credibility crisis. When supporters face constant false urgency and manufactured crises, they develop skepticism toward all political communications—including genuine emergencies. I discovered after last year's election that I'd missed several legitimate texts from the California Secretary of State’s Office with actual voting information—buried in the avalanche of fundraising spam.

This manipulation extends to the fundraising narrative itself. If you believed the constant pleas, you'd think Democrats are being crushed by Republican fundraising. Every other text warns of being "MASSIVELY outspent" by the Koch network or claims mysterious conservative donors are flooding races with untraceable cash. But this narrative is false. Democrats have generally outraised Republicans in recent election cycles, including 2024 where they did so by a large margin. They aren't struggling for money—they're addicted to the scare tactics that generate it, regardless of what those tactics do to support trust and democratic engagement.

To be clear, the issue is not political fundraising itself, nor is every text problematic. Messages from new or lesser-known candidates, particularly at the start of a campaign, often serve a vital democratic function. These initial communications can be genuinely informative—introducing a candidate’s background, platform, and reasons for running. For many voters, this is a valuable form of political discovery, and the subsequent fundraising appeals are grounded in the legitimate need to hire staff and build an operation.

The problem is not the simple act of asking for money; it is a party-wide engagement strategy that has come to rely on deception rather than inspiration.

A Question of Respect

Healthy political parties treat supporters as partners in a shared project. They explain goals clearly, provide honest updates, and make their case for support without manufacturing crises or offering phantom matches. They build trust through transparency, not manipulation.

The Democratic Party faces a choice. It can continue chasing short-term revenue through tactics that erode long-term trust. Or it can recognize that sustainable political power comes from an engaged base that believes in the mission—not from supporters who feel conned into compliance.

If these tactics exhaust or annoy you, you have power. Contact your representatives and party officials. Forward them these texts. Ask them directly: is this how you want the Democratic Party to be known—as the party that treated its own supporters like marks?

Beyond holding leaders accountable, voters can empower a new kind of politician. A powerful example is Kat Abughazaleh, a Democrat running for Congress in Illinois. Her campaign is a direct rebuke of these practices: she has publicly committed to a “no-spam” platform; replacing fake deadlines with specific, public fundraising targets; and vowing never to sell supporter data. Her guiding principle gets to the heart of the issue: people want to be involved in politics, but they “don’t want to be treated like idiots or dollar signs.”

Real political change requires more than fundraising. It requires organizing, sustained engagement, and leaders who inspire rather than exhaust. Most importantly, it requires a party that respects its supporters enough to see them as vital to a cause rather than sources of cash.

You are a concerned citizen, not an ATM. Your value to democracy cannot be measured in donation amounts. Act accordingly—and demand that your party does too.