This is Zitron-length, but worth it. I guess it files under “no matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.”

Your phone buzzes with a frantic text message. “DEMOCRACY IS ON THE LINE.” It’s not the first time you’ve gotten a fundraising text like this from the Democratic Party and its candidates. Nor the first time you’ve rolled your eyes. But the ask makes sense. Democracy really is on the line. You have asked yourself what you would have done if you had lived under the authoritarian regimes of the past, and volunteering some time and money seems like the least you could do. You click the ActBlue link and donate $100. The country must be saved, after all.

You, the ordinary American, are expected to step up. But are the party insiders stepping up as well? At the very same moment your $100 clears, the party leadership and strategists are at a donor retreat you were not invited to, walking a few dozen people who write seven-figure checks through the polling and the proprietary model that will set the party’s priorities for the cycle. You have a general sense that this is how the game is played, that winning elections requires money from big and small donors. You’re skeptical of the House and Senate leadership, who are increasingly unpopular with the base. But overall, you see a party apparatus that wants to win and oust the Republican Party from control of government, and you assume both tracks feed that goal.

We’re here to tell you that this view is wrong. The Democratic Party is being devoured by an ecosystem of consultants. Mostly out of view of the party’s voters and activists, political consultants are paid to raise the money, place the ads, and set the strategy. And they’re paid regardless of whether the party wins or loses.

If your $100 was in response to a fundraising text or email, the single most expensive way to raise money in American politics, $65 is instantly consumed by the cost of asking you for it. Asking this often, and this aggressively, is expensive. It means paying the data brokers who traffic in your personal information, the digital copywriters who draft the inexplicably bizarre messaging, the email and SMS providers who specialize in slipping past spam filters, the compliance lawyers, and, of course, the fundraising consultants. Another $2 goes to strategic consultants for advice on how to spend what’s left, and $14 to administration, travel, and staff. Of the $19 that finally goes toward advertising for the actual candidate, $6 is skimmed off the top as a placement commission before a single ad airs. In the end, barely $13 of your $100 buys real airtime or digital ads.

Fundraising via text message represents the high end of fundraising costs. Even averaged across all itemized donations, including the wealthy mega-donors writing checks, Democratic campaigns now spend 45 cents of every dollar on fundraising costs, a fourfold increase since 2004. Today’s campaigns like to imagine themselves as efficient machines, remade by big data and microtargeting. In reality, they are less efficient and more extractive than at any point in modern history. Most charity watchdogs will not certify an organization that spends more than 35 percent of its revenue on fundraising. The Democratic Party once cleared that bar, but it no longer does, and for the small-dollar donors it leans on hardest, it isn’t close.

In 2024, Democratic campaigns burned through $2 billion on fundraising operations alone, nearly as much as they spent on advertising. Across both parties, spending on donor contact lists exploded from $20 million in 2004 to $351 million by 2020. Your contact information is a commodity, bought and resold by list brokers who profit not by cultivating you as a reliable member of the party but by churning through you. You are worth more exhausted across 15 campaigns than nurtured by one.