Really interesting opening today in Matt Friedman's Politico NJ's Playbook.
(As an aside, I am no great fan of Bill Spadea. I remember him once saying that Rob Nixon, the former Councilman from Jackson, is not an anti-Semite, after it came out that he was parking outside Frum houses on Friday night to count the amount of people coming for a minyan. "I didn't read the whole story about him and the allegations, but I know Rob and he doesn't have an Anti-Semitic bone in his body." He went on to say that Nixon was being targeted unfairly, etc... What type of dunce just rambles on the radio defending a bigot without even reading the allegations first?)
But here's Friedman's piece:
Campaigns often boast about small dollar donations as a strength. And Bill Spadea did just that at the Republican gubernatorial debate last week. “I started a group called Elect Common Sense. And Elect Common Sense raised $1 million in 10 months and our average donation was $11.14 per person,” he said.
Something’s always stuck out to me about donations to Spadea’s PAC, and more lately his campaign for governor. Quite often, donors are from faraway states, they list their occupation as retired, and they give small amounts repeatedly.
Madison Fernandez and I also found that, unlike other New Jersey gubernatorial campaigns we looked at, Spadea’s fundraising appeals have an automatically-checked box to make donations recurring. “KEEP THIS BOX CHECKED,” the ads say.
So we called a bunch of those donors. And of the more than a dozen we got in touch with, most had no idea who Bill Spadea was. And just two were aware that they were donating to him frequently. They were all over the age of 70. A common theme was they wanted to help Donald Trump. Indeed, when you look at the fundraising emails. They’re often about Trump — or at least a Trump. One I looked at about Melania Trump didn’t mention Spadea at all until the disclaimer at the bottom.
”I don’t understand it,” one of the donors, an 85-year-old from Georgia, told me. “It bothers me a lot. I don’t remember him … It’s my personal money and my funds are limited. In fact, I’m totally out right now.”
Since most of the donors weren’t even aware they were giving to Spadea, there’s no way to know for sure how they started giving. But it’s a reasonable guess that they intended to give a small amount once without realizing they were signing up for recurring donations. One of the donors we talked to had no idea who Spadea was, despite giving him a total of about $1,000. Then she discovered she had $4,000 of unknown donations to many different candidates. She canceled her credit card.
While we didn’t see this pattern with other gubernatorial campaigns in New Jersey, plugging some of these donors’ names into the Federal Election Commission's website shows Spadea is not the only candidate doing this. Indeed, it was a significant scandal four years ago, when The New York Times wrote about the fundraising practice.
We do not allege there’s anything illegal about this. But how would you feel if your non-tech-savvy parent or grandparent had their credit drained by political donations they didn’t know they were making?