You've been warned
Doomscroll 4.26.2026
Hello and welcome to another edition of Doomscroll - your favorite newsletter covering all things digital on the right! Lots of venting this week, folks, so buckle up and let’s get to some scrolling.
Thanks to everyone who answered last week’s One Question about why Republican candidates are getting crushed on the fundraising front! Since it was an open-ended question I don’t have a nice, quick summary to give you. I did, however, get a lot of thoughtful comments. Here are some of them:
Trump is on the Ballot for them, not for us. Hate drives donations.
Reliable national donors are seemingly reluctant to give to candidates right now. Obviously there are exceptions. But in mass - that seems to be the case. Trump is certainly a factor here. I have spoken with countless donors over the past month who are currently losing money due to the Trump Tariffs. That being said, it isn’t the only factor here. Lack of candidate quality plays a factor. For instance: Michael Whatley isn’t exactly a stellar candidate who has great charisma; although, his fundraising is extremely lackluster given his previous job... All that to say. We need to do a better job of messaging to our donors. Not flooding their phones and emails with texts/emails. And focusing on relationships.
What could the reason be other than bias in inboxing? How many cycles do we have to get crushed in low donor fundraising before some of you wake up?
I feel like Dems consistently outraise Republicans, however the committees and President Trump’s operation raising their substantial amounts of cash make me feel better about these individual candidates getting outraised. It feels like the Dems play is to get money directly to the candidates whereas Republicans are focused on the larger groups making spending decisions. Will be interesting to see which pays off.
Our friends on the Left understand the value of a good sequence. Telling a story and maybe not playing the role of Chicken Little every 10 minutes.
History shows that when a leader of a party/government/movement goes rogue, broadly-defined, that hurts the morale of the base of the movement or party. Trump’s rhetoric -- and many of his actions -- are a combination of nonsensical, diabolical, harmful, and counter-productive. Moreover, instead of addressing Americans’ problems, he is making them worse with his Neocon-interventionist foreign policy, which is the exact opposite of his campaign rhetoric. The GOP small-donor base sees the disconnect. …. Money in politics is like munitions in warfare -- it only gets you so far. There are many more criteria and intangibles required for victory. Morale and voter enthusiasm are grossly-underrated with regard to the most important bottom-line metric -- voter turnout.
You work in this space. You tell us what the issue is.
Ok so some of you pointed out we have a messaging problem, which is only being made harder by the Trump Administration doing things that are pissing off the base. Some of you mentioned candidate quality. At least one of you said inboxing (!!) Whoever left the comment about candidate vs. committee fundraising raised an interesting question. Maybe the left and right ecosystems just operate differently in ways that play out via online fundraising programs. Whether one way is better than the other is…TBD? That last comment, though? I hear you. If the people want to know what Amanda Elliott thinks, she’s going to tell you.
I 100% do not have all the answers, but I do have thoughts and I think a lot of it is structural. What do we do when we launch a new fundraising program? We take whatever email list the candidate has already scraped together. We warm it up and start hitting it daily. We take their cell phone numbers and start sending P2P. Messages get more frequent and the asks more urgent. We beat that house file into the ground until it becomes so unreliable we move the bulk of our efforts to revshares. Doesn’t matter if the split is 95-5 as long as that “total money raised” column keeps up, right? And since we’re now all sending to the same lists and competing for the same donors, the race to stand out gets harder and harder. The matches go up. The promises get more extreme. We do things like tell grandmas in Iowa that their DOGE check is on the way if only they donate $20 to some candidate in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the house file isn’t growing. We’re not finding new donors. We’re not telling compelling stories or treating donors with respect, we’re just trying to get to Election Day.
So what’s happening here? We’re running the same programs over and over and think if we just scare people enough at the exact right moment they’ll chip in $10. And then when they’re on the WinRed page we can trick them into an upsell or making it a recurring donation. Or maybe if we just show up in their inbox often enough they’ll get exasperated, cave, and throw $5 our way. Only now they’re exasperated- AND ON THE DONOR LIST - so really what they thought would help their problem is actually about to make it a whole lot worse. It’s the same old playbook.
Look, I don’t know what Democrats do over on their side of the aisle - except for what I can see publicly. But it seems to me like they work much better as a group to train their fundraising machine on the races and candidates who either A) need it the most or B) rile up their base the most. The North Carolina senate race is huge this year. When Roy Cooper got in it seemed like every single Democrat entity on planet earth was doing sends for Roy Cooper. Same for James Talarico. That dude did not walk out of the state senate and piece together a $30 million fundraising machine out of nowhere. We just don’t have that kind of willingness (or infrastructure?) to make that happen on our side.
And sure, maybe in 2026 we’ll be fine because the committees, super PACs, or the Trump machine will save our candidates’ butts. But what we do today has implications far beyond just this cycle and I think not realizing that is a little shortsighted. We have good candidates. We have good stories. We even have the tech, though while we’re on the subject of tech maybe it’s time to take a little detour (indulge me): WinRed has a PR problem - and that’s coming from someone who loves WinRed. I think they’ve done great things overall for the party and there’s not a better platform out there. But the truth is simple: Lots of uninformed donors hate it. They blame it for the scammy nature of our programs and honestly WinRed should probably be mad AT ALL OF US for not taking better care of our fundraising platform. Instead, they’ve become the bogeyman. Are we losing a ton of revenue because people simply refuse to click on WinRed links anymore? Maybe not a ton, but I’m starting to believe it’s not NOT having an impact.
Anyway, I told you I had thoughts. You were warned! But let’s get to this week’s One Question and settle the inboxing debate once and for all. As one commenter put it:
What could the reason be other than bias in inboxing? How many cycles do we have to get crushed in low donor fundraising before some of you wake up?
So what say all of you? Is the hand-wringing pointless because the only way to solve this is to get Big Tech to stop censoring Republican emails with WinRed links? How big a problem is this?
The above quote comes from a Substack essay from THE Chris Wilson. It’s a startling stat - and one he uses to respond to that David Plouffe NYT op-ed I talked about a couple weeks ago. To refresh: Plouffe argued that campaigns in 2026 should be full-time production studios. Wilson essentially says yes…but that’s only half the picture and focusing on output alone won’t cut it either. If only about 2% of American adults decide elections, what matters more is reaching them at the exact right time with a message that moves. So: identifying those who are truly persuadable and distributing the content that will persuade them. It ain’t easy, folks, but necessary and something to keep in mind. Just a thought!
—Fighting over fair maps
Welp, it was a big week in the Commonwealth of Virginia - and many of you, I presume. Thanks to some truly vile Democrat legislators, Virginia’s map is getting redrawn to basically eliminate all but one Republican congressional seat. Womp, womp. I haven’t really written about this until now because - full disclosure - I did some of the digital for Virginians for Fair Maps. And fwiw I don’t love writing about stuff I’m working on as I’m working on it. Just feels weird. But now that the voters have spoken I feel the need to say a few things - not about the digital component per se which was run absolutely flawlessly (duh) - but about all the backseat driving from people who weren’t even in the room to begin with.
Not to name names, but there’s been a lot of people out there crowing about how IF ONLY Virginia Republicans had funded their GOTV program, the No side would have won. IF ONLY they hadn’t bought so much TV (or they didn’t buy enough TV - which is it?), the No side would have won. IF ONLY the RNC and CLF had spent more, the No side would have won. And on and on… Well guess what, guys? This referendum was the first federal special election since 2024 that the GOP effort overperformed President Trump’s 2024 margin. In other words: Virginia Republicans still know how to play. And if they chose not to give your organization millions of dollars to door-knock or pay you to write a few op-eds and post on X (you know who you are!) then tough beans. These pay-to-post guys can yell all they want after Election Day, but their extortion scheme didn’t pass the sniff test, sorry.
Considering what we were up against: around $90 million in outside money, a ridiculously-worded ballot question, and a very (let’s just be real) national anti-Trump sentiment, it was always going to be a tough hill to climb. And like I said - in the broader context of all the specials we’ve seen lately, we did a pretty ok job even if things didn’t go our way on Election Day (darn those mail-in ballots, amirite?). It’s just funny to me how everyone knows what would have saved the day after the fact. And it alway just happens to be the *solution* that would have made them or their organization millions of dollars. Just saying. This is always a game of limited information. If you were a national group considering your allocation of resources in 2026 and thinking about Virginia after Winsome Sears’ performance in 2025, what would you do? Send millions to the state that elected Jay Jones? The people pointing fingers at CLF, RNC, etc aren’t the ones who actually ran the No campaign and tbh, that should tell you everything you need to know. Ok, biased vent sesh over.
—Speaking of paying to post…
I feel like this is something I’m for SURE going to talk about a lot more later, but the Lexington Herald-Leader published a fascinating piece about a week ago about influencers posting positive things about Nate Morris. The story asks a simple question: Are they getting paid to post good things about Morris on X? Here’s just a small snippet:
Over the last 10 months — since Morris launched his campaign in June 2025 — the trio of accounts has posted near-simultaneously timed messages of praise about him 20 times. In the first three months of 2026, at least one of the three accounts reposted 56% of Morris’ posts. About 30% of the time, all three accounts reposted Morris, sharing his posts to their collective 4.8 million followers. In a statement, Morris’ campaign denied any relationship with the accounts.
Here’s the thing: Morris’ campaign could legit deny any relationship with the influencers if all the posting was coordinated through a third party…like an agency by the name of, oh I don’t know…X Strategies. When the Herald-Leader reached out to X to ask about posting on behalf of Morris, here’s what founder Alex Bruesewitz said:
“This is fake news that an anti-Trump consultant working for one of Nate’s opponents likely fed to you,” Bruesewitz wrote to the Herald-Leader. “But I am used to anti-Trump losers and fake news journalists spreading lies about me, I suppose it comes with the territory. I am proud to be on Team Morris because Nate is a good man who built an incredible business and loves our country.”
I mean….I have thoughts. First and foremost being: if this is your business model why are you so defensive, Alex? It’s not hard to figure out if a campaign is paying X Strategies (The Morris campaign paid it $90,000 in 2025). It’s not hard to figure out that coordinating paid messaging campaigns with influencers is what X Strategies does (unless I’m totally wrong in which case please correct me?!?).
I’m not even going to argue that this is bad. It’s actually probably not bad. It’s actually probably a good strategic move if you’re running in a competitive primary in a red state. When you know it’s hard to cut through the noise and you have the resources to fund this kind of operation…why not try it? At the same time, if you’re a creator/influencer, you have to know people will probably catch on at some point and realize you’re not just posting out of the goodness of your heart…And when you’re called out I would think you’d want to have a better answer than “fake news.” But hey, that’s just me!
—Speaker Johnson’s War Room
Speaker Johnson’s team rolled out a war room X account this week. Good for them. But I can’t not get nit-picky for a second. With all the space I devoted a couple weeks ago to the differences between comms and digital…ONLY comms staffers would feel the need to put “run by the communications team” in the bio. Like, ok guys. Now we all know everything posted to this account is being filtered through 100 comms staffers. 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
💳 AdWeek got its hands on a leaked pitch deck from StackAdapt that supposedly pitched ChatGPT ad CPMs as low as $15…Of course the story is paywalled, but there’s a Reddit thread for everything!
🖱️ And apparently OpenAI is now offering CPC campaigns on ChatGPT…
💻 Enjoyed this essay/interview about Raisin Bran’s strategy of replying to comments - especially on Threads.
👩💻 Also enjoyed this post from Campaign Trend about why we should stop posting links. I’ll be honest: I’ve been slow to make this change, but not anymore! Key point: The better way to think about social media is as a discovery channel. It’s where potential voters and supporters find you for the first time. It’s not where you convert them.
Congrats to Sydney Fowler for joining John Hall Strategies!
S/o to Jordan Lieberman for his post taking us through a political journey of America’s restaurants. I 100% forgot Thunder Grill ever existed.
And…..a couple new comments through the gossip button!
Commenting on the staffer video posted to an official account. Look at what happened in Kentucky with Andy Barr’s Campaign Manager. Promoting staff members opens them up to attacks. Staff is just that, they should not be the center of attention. They are doing a job and didn’t sign up to have their entire life scrutinized by the news media. Maybe we’re moving into a different world, but seems like a dangerous door to open.
Haha. I submitted my answer the first question before reading the section on inboxing. You get mixed answers because we been trained to believe that inboxing at significantly less than 100% is not only acceptable but a good thing. We’re thrilled when clients inbox at 30%. Demand better.
To the first comment: That’s a fair point and also why I say proceed with caution and at your own risk! If you’re a senior level staffer and want to assume the risk of generating content for a campaign account - go for it. Could be great. If you don’t want to? Don’t. Should never be a job requirement!
To that second comment: hmmm…point taken! We’ll see what the masses say this week!
Got a tip for The Grapevine? Job announcement? Job opening? Email ‘em to me at itsthedoomscroll@gmail.com
From the other side of the aisle:
Pod Save America bro Dan Pfeiffer is launching something called Message Box Pro - “a political consulting subscription that gives campaigns, candidates, and organizers access to weekly strategy memos, office hours with me, message testing and polling insights, and a community of operatives and organizers from across the country. All at a fraction of the cost of traditional consulting.”
Interesting concept. Read his post about why here.
From the other side of the tracks:
Ok, as if we didn’t need another reason to be wary of partnering with influencers… Was anyone else following (I say “following” loosely) the drama around influencers being uninvited to Coachella and then posting about it non-stop? Supposedly brands invited smaller creators to go as part of some partnership deals…and then uninvited them at the last minute. Sondra Clark has a great post about why this means agencies HAVE to treat influencers of all sizes with respect - they don’t operate by the same rules as journalists after all! But now that we’ve moved past the outrage portion, many are asking a different question: Were these influencers even invited to begin with? Or is this all a marketing scheme to up the drama and drive engagement? They’re not naming names or saying which brands did the uninviting. Sure, maybe that’s to protect future deals but also: when your main currency is trust and authenticity, disclosure is important. If you’re going to publicly shame bad actors…name the bad actors! If there’s a takeaway here for the political world it’s this: when dealing with influencers…tread lightly.
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Thank you for the shoutout. Really enjoy your newsletter and regularly forward it to the Digital Directors for my clients!