This is a post about how to preserve your privacy and avoid spam while still supporting Democratic campaigns and movements. The TL;DR is that I want you to take action now. My recommended actions:

• Sign petition 1 and petition 2.
• See Ready to do more? at ethicalemail.org and send opt-out emails to democratic data brokers
• (if you're in California) Sign up for DROP
• Donate money to Movement Voter Project
• Donate money to candidates via Oath.vote

Read on for more details!

Background

In my phone's SMS app, the suggested first word for a response is stop. This is because I get an ungodly amount of political spam. No good deed goes unpunished, and my reward for caring about politics is to be forever blasted by messages with subject lines like URGENT, Live Poll OPEN - For Democrats ONLY, and WE ARE BEGGING YOU. Though I diligently stop to end, I continue getting on lists for newly-formed PACs or campaigns of the Democratic candidates for Comptroller of the City of Muncie, Indiana.

Now, I don't have to tell you that things are pretty dire out there. An unaccountable paramilitary force rampages around American cities, our "leaders" are engaging in massive corruption, and the global order is being dismantled for no reason. Meanwhile, our civilization has real problems; to name a few: climate change, the risks of AI, centralized wealth, rising authoritarianism, nuclear proliferation, novel or treatment-resistant pathogens. I would love to help elect leaders who are, you know, interested in some of these.

On the other hand, the spam...

Whence the spam

I had assumed that the spam is the fault of ActBlue. However, it turns out this is not true, a fact I discovered by reading The Movement Voter Project's FAQ. Instead, when you donate to a candidate/campaign via ActBlue, they share your information with that specific candidate/campaign. The campaign then later sells your data. Sometimes, they sell it to other campaigns. Other times, it goes to shady consulting firms extracting money from anxious seniors by using dramatic or false claims. (Though, actually, that investigation into Mothership Strategies by Adam Bonica did lead ActBlue to implement some policy changes).

Stemming the Tide

From Movement Voter, I learned about Ethical Email, which is trying to organize resistance to the Big Blue Spam Machine. The great thing about Ethical Email is they're very action-oriented. They have two petitions I signed -- one pledging not to support candidates who sell their donor data, and one urging NGPVAN, which runs much Democratic campaign tooling, to do a better job preventing non-consensual spam.

Beyond that, they also provide convenient templates to request data deletion from a few big Democratic data brokers (see the Ready to do more? section of Ethical Email). Californians like me have special rights under our consumer protection act, and I invoked that in the messages I sent to the data brokers. (BTW, if you're a California resident, California runs a program called DROP which will automatically delete your data from a bunch of data brokers; sign up right now!)

Prevention: 16x Better Than Cure

If you're like me, you might want to donate to political candidates without also signing up for a bunch of spam from other candidates you know nothing about. I want this too! Alas, your candidate is probably too busy raising money and filming TikToks, and has left day-to-day campaign operations to the same consultants who brought us Mothership Strategies. What to do while the Ethical Email petitions get traction?

Well, you might start by donating money to privacy-conscious organizations. The main one I recommend is Movement Voter Project. I actually prefer organizations like MVP over giving money directly to campaigns (aka hard money). I want to invest in building movements and organizations which survive past a single campaign, and can go on to build political coalitions.

On the other hand, voices I trust strongly recommend the hard-money approach. Through that blog post, I learned about oath.vote, which not only researches effective candidates but advocates for donor privacy with those candidates. Their donation is organized around specific causes, like Protecting Democracy or Flip the House. Those are the two I personally donated to.

Act Now

Whether you care about spam or nah, this is no time to sit on the sidelines. If you have the means, you should be donating to anti-MAGA campaigns. I've suggested some privacy-preserving donation paths, and also some approaches to reclaim your privacy from data brokers. Matt Yglesias has other recommendations. Either way, don't get caught up in analysis paralysis; take action.