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Well, by the time you hear this, it's either going to be debate day or shortly after the debate. But the question that anyone's going to be asking before or afterwards is, will it matter? Is what the two candidates going to say for 90 minutes on a stage in Atlanta going to affect the trajectory of the race?

What we know from the past is bloody well not likely. Why? It's weird. You know, you've got the two people who want to be leaders of America and leaders of the free world arguing, sometimes dealing in substance, but at the very least having witty answers to questions prepared by America's top journalists. How can this not move things?

Well, the thing is that by the time two candidates get to the stage, most of the time they are their party's nominees. Now, in this case, they're not formally the nominees, but we know what's going to happen. And once you're the party nominees, partisanship kicks in. The Republicans are almost always going to vote for the Republican. The Democrats are almost always going to vote for the Democrats. Even many independents lean one way or another. So it has to be pretty sharp to break through that gap.

partisan noise. And what happens is candidates at this point in history know how to prepare for debate. They're not going to do things like Richard Nixon in the first televised debate, not putting on makeup and looking like he had not just five o'clock shadow, but a dastardly scowl.

They know how to answer questions and to deflect them onto the topic that they want. It may not be edifying. It may not be Lincoln versus Douglas. But they know how to talk, and they know how to make their points, and they're received well by their partisans. So you very rarely see a significant polling change.

The other reason why, probably not in this case, is because both candidates are extremely well known. Now, take a look at this. This is the first time since the 19th century when we're going to have two candidates meet in the immediately subsequent election. It'll be the first time ever.

in a while since you've had a candidate be nominated three times in a row by a major party. The fact is 98% of voters already know these people. They already have formed opinions about these people. And that's unusual is that in an open race, often even though they're the nominees, candidates are still

Not as widely known. The opinions aren't as firm. People will tune in because they're going to learn something, whether it's the other party's candidate or learn something a little bit more about your candidate. But in this case.

People know what they think about Joe Biden. They know what they think about Donald Trump. They may tune in for curiosity. They may tune in because they don't like either of them, and they're going to try and figure out which of the two they dislike least. But this is not a case where somebody is trying to make a first impression. This is a case where somebody is trying to make a thousand and first impression, and those are always going to be less impactful than the first impression. Now, when things do matter, they tend to be

on negative mistakes, not on positive points. It's very hard to think of a positive point that has really turned a campaign around. Maybe you go back to 1980 where Ronald Reagan famously responded to yet another negative attack from Jimmy Carter by saying, "There you go again," and then turned around and delivered a memorable response and had a memorable closing statement. But other than that, the points one remembers are the mistakes.

Gerald Ford saying that Poland isn't being in the Soviet sphere of influence. Al Gore sighing a lot during the debate that became the subject of a Saturday Night Live skit. It was so excessive. George Herbert Walker Bush looking at his watch during the debate to see whether or not time was up because.

He was bored and he was behind. And Trump kind of acting mashugana in the first debate in 2020. You know, we remember those because they're out of the ordinary and they reflect poorly on the person. So when those happen, you tend to see something happen. But even those tend to be blips. You see a slight declutter.

Klein in poll or you see in terms of Gerald Ford, he had been gaining and suddenly he stopped momentum. But the thing is, by the end of the campaign, they're back up to where you kind of they were beforehand or where you would expect them to be. It's very rare when you see something actually change the trajectory of the campaign. Now, you can't

Never say never. We've learned a lot about that in the last decade of American politics, is that every time somebody says never happen, turns out that something happened. So you never want to say never. But the odds are this is going to be a lot of heat and sound and fury. But the race is extremely static. And what that means is that the candidates are going to be trying to

Jar the other person into that mistake But do it without committing a mistake themselves obviously Trump's overly

pugnacious attempts in 2020 backfired on him. Will we see an overly pugnacious attempt by Joe Biden to spur that on from Trump? You know, will this be kind of like a political version of Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope theory in the 1970s of how he would beat a physically younger and superior boxer by basically frustrating them against the ropes in the arena?

We don't know. But what we know is that debates can only matter in the modern world when they break through the haze of partisanship. We know that

People who don't like either candidate tend to break late. They are slowly breaking off now, but they'll still be 5 to 10 percent of Americans three months from now who will try desperately to avoid making a choice they don't want. Maybe this debate will inform them a little bit, but do not expect the trajectory of this change race to change significantly in the next couple of weeks unless somebody commits a gap for the ages.

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Well, we talk a lot about demographics and polls and campaign ads on this show. But of course, one of the most important things is fundraising. You can't shoot weapons if you don't have the ammunition. And in politics, money is ammunition. And here to talk with us today is one of

Well, America's leading ammunition suppliers, and that's Becky Donatelli, the founder of Campaign Solutions and Connell Donatelli. Becky, welcome to Beyond the Folds. Thank you, Henry. Delighted to be here.

Well, how did you get your start in fundraising? All of us Politico people have fun stories of, you know, mom talked about Goldwater in 1964 or I met the cute girl at college and, you know, something that got us in. How did you get into politics but then get into fundraising in particular?

So I was raised in Orange County, California, by a very politically oriented family. We talked about politics all the time. And in Orange County, that meant we talked about conservative or Republican politics. I do. I'm going to date myself here. But I do remember being a little girl.

six, seven years old, and it was 1960. And we went with my mother to her open house at school because she was a school teacher and it was also election night. So they had televisions in the classrooms and they had the results. And being in California, three hours later, we pretty much knew that John F. Kennedy was going to be president. And remember my mother crying.

and saying, "What's going to happen to our country?" So we started being indoctrinated at a very young age that Republican was the way to vote and those were the candidates we supported. So I just came by it naturally. And as far as the fundraising is concerned, you either are born this way or you're not. It is a bit of a curse.

You it's it's instinctive. You have to know how to ask someone for money, how to create an environment where people want to be involved, want to give. I just have always known how to do that. And I'm going to date myself again. But back in the first what was really the second Reagan campaign in 1976, but the first real flow full blown campaign, I.

I my first job from college answering telephones at Reagan headquarters. And so it was not a terribly successful campaign in the beginning. And then the campaign did two things. They won the North Carolina primary.

And they bought a half an hour television time, which had never really been done before. And Ronald Reagan talked to the American people for 30 minutes on TV. And the money came rolling in. But in those days, remember, it had to be mailed in. First, we had to mail out a piece asking for money. And then people had to mail their check back into the campaign. So everything took a little time. But...

The campaign wanted to borrow some money to float their salaries and operating expenses. And the way that the bank figured out how much they could loan them is we would literally weigh the mail sacks that came in every day to headquarters in D.C. And if it weighs a certain amount of weight, we knew that much money was going to come in. Not terribly scientific, but that was my first real experience with big time fundraising.

And I know for me, when I was 12 or 13, I watched, I got addicted when I was six, following Nixon and New Hampshire and so forth as a little kid. But 13, I remember watching the returns. And of course, back then there were no exit polls and you just watch these clunky things, not super in toes numbers on your screen. And I remember watching them and thinking, I wonder how those numbers get there.

Yes, exactly. And so now I'm here. I spend my life thinking about it. You must have seen those sacks and thought, I wonder how these dollars get here. And I get them. Well, it was really fun because it was such a grassroots uprising. And that's what, as a fundraiser, you're always looking for money.

What's going to inspire everybody to just give even without being deliberately asked, but think today I need to give money to this person or that person. We just saw it recently with Trump. He had a very big day after his conviction and I'm breaking all records. And most of those were unsolicited. They did solicit and send out links, push it. But much of it was just spontaneous. I got to help this guy. I'm going to go find a place to give him money.

Now, you've always focused, if I remember correctly, more on grassroots fundraising, the small-dollar donor, than the let's-go-talk-to-the-billionaire-and-get-the-eight-figure check. Yes. For whatever it is, that's mostly where I've lived my fundraising life. I like high-dollar fundraising. It's kind of fun to get one great big check, but I'll tell you, it's a bigger rush to get $5,000.

And to watch the meter click over and over and over and over and over as more and more people come out and say, I want to give, I want to be part of this movement, I love this candidate, this cause, I want to be there.

So when did you start your first business? I mean, there's this gap between answering telephones in 1976. For those of us who, you know, for my listeners who aren't of a particular age, your then husband was Ronald Reagan's political director during the second term. When did you step out on your own and become the maven of grassroots fundraising?

So you just hit on it when he went into government, we figured one of us had to earn a real living. And so I went ahead and got a real estate license. I started selling real estate and I started a real estate company, which is just like fundraising, but at least somebody gets something there for their expense. And I also got involved with a DeNovo bank and we started a national bank, which was like getting an MBA for me. Fascinating period of my life.

This is all in Northern Virginia. All in Northern Virginia, Alexandria. And anyway, I took to the bank world too. Fascinating. Loved it. And then in the early 90s, I sold the real estate company that I'd started. And we sold the bank because, of course, banks, that's what they do. They sell to each other. And I decided to volunteer full-time for Bob Dole.

friends were helping in the campaign and I... This is the '88 campaign, not the '96? No, this is the '96. Okay, got it. '96 campaign.

That campaign. Hey, he got the nomination. Hey, listen, I loved Bob Dole. What an amazing man and what a fine person he was, but it was not maybe the best campaign that's ever been done, but there you go. Anyway, so the biggest problem that the campaign had with their fundraising is people kept writing in their credit card numbers and they

They would transpose a number or they would not put in their address or they would put in the wrong date, expiration date. So about a third of all the credit card contributions couldn't be processed or people that sat there all day long calling up these donors and saying, hey, can we have your credit card number again today?

Somebody said a young man, Rob Arena and Catherine Coombs, but they both said if Amazon can sell books on the Internet, we should be able to take a donation. So after the 96 campaign, I've sold my companies, my little board. I'm thinking, what should we do? And so we decided to start a grassroots campaign consulting company, Tom Hockaday and I. And we

I was too stupid to know any better, but I understood the banking part of things and how money goes places and merchant accounts and those sorts of things. And I was just stupid enough to go, well, let's write the software and see if we can take donations online. And so we did. And in 1998, Campaign Solutions

had eight total clients, people willing to say, I have a website and I will give you space to put a donation link on it. And Governor George Pataki, who was doing his first reelection campaign, so his second campaign, received a donation for $250 from a man in New York who I wish I had written down his name. And we thought, well, man, this is easy.

Of course, it wasn't easy at all. But thank you to that man and George Pataki for being the first.

So arguably, I don't know then if you were the first, but you're certainly one of the early pioneers in online fundraising. We're talking about AOL, dial-up era, and so forth. So you were the first in both parties? So I was first in the political sphere, both parties. There was a guy at the Red Cross who had written his own programs, and he was taking money online for the Red Cross. And I think we were about it.

So you're the Christopher Columbus of online fundraising. We all need to blame you. You're the fontanel. No, no, no. It's not my fault. Well, we'll get into that, I'm sure. It's partly our fault. Yeah, so it was not considered a big deal at the time. We almost had to beg people to let us put a donation link, and we got turned down a lot. So, you know, everything starts slowly.

Overnight success. There we go. The hall of shame, the big name politicians who you can destroy their career by saying, and they didn't know the power of online fundraising. So not to disparage anybody, but George W. Bush in the 2000 campaign did not take online donations.

Which made a little sense. Carl was a male guy and that's what he knew. And he didn't need it. He didn't need it really. I was just going to say with Bush's Rangers running around setting record sums, you don't need a $10 donation. So how, you know, I feel like here I'm asking, and when you went out there and it said Darby Dragons, um,

What was it like in the wild west of early online fundraising? How did you figure out, besides putting up the passive, here's how you can give if you're already on the website, how did you move from that to active online fundraising? So if you have plenty of money, you never need to innovate.

So it's when you're broke or the campaign is failing or whatever. It's like everything else in life. You have to have an incentive to change things and do things differently. So our change agent was John McCain.

You remember when from President in 2008, John McCain. Yeah. No, no, no, no. This is the 99-2000 John McCain. Okay. Yeah. So this is the first iteration. And so you're on the straight talk express. Exactly. Exactly. So that's where really it all began, period. So we were shocked, as everybody else, that he won the New Hampshire primary.

And he would tell a story that he raised a million dollars overnight. He didn't. It took four days to raise a million dollars overnight. But it was the first example of the money coming in over the transom without a direct ask, the money coming in as a result of outside events. We didn't have to wait to have our mail guys quickly write a letter. We won the primary. Give us money. So it was all the power of the instant transaction.

gratification, the instant donation. It was the dividing point in which we began to understand the power of this crazy online presence. It just opened up the ability for you, for me, for anybody to participate. So we got a lot of press for that. It brought in a lot of money. But that's where the direct marketing began because as a requirement for a donation, we asked for your email address.

We're going to want to tell these people to vote, remind them which their primary. It was purely a vote of contact at that point reason for asking for email. And then we were so broke because even though he raised a lot of money from New Hampshire, we were just miles behind where Bush was.

And to be competitive going into South Carolina and all the dreadful things that happened in that particular primary, we just needed money. So we said, let's email everybody and ask them if they want to give again. And we did. And it was very successful. So Max folks was the, the online digital guy in the campaign. And so we actually just kind of ran by the seat of our pants. How often should we ask somebody?

I mean, we're in, we grew up in direct mail and, you know, there has to be a significant period of time between the asks and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we just said, okay, every six weeks, we're going to ask somebody for money. And that was our, that was our rule. We're not going to bother anybody more than six weeks. We're not going to ask for money from people who are in a state that have an important primary coming up. So that and subsequent campaigns, we never asked for a dime from anyone who lived in Iowa or New Hampshire.

So we're trying to figure out what are best practices and what is the etiquette. And that stood for a while. And as the industry grew and we did things differently, it changes and we changed along with it.

So was there a point by the end of that decade, you know, the '08, 2010 period where there's kind of you had through trial and error and experiment, like all of these things, so you'd kind of figured out a what works for this time period?

So early on, it was all about the website. And so everything we did was to drive people to the website because on the website, there was a link. Well, email got better and we got smarter. And we began to realize that rather than trying to push people to a website to do something, let's give them the action item first.

and give it to them. So whatever it is we wanted somebody to do, that's what went into the email. And it was really only email at that point, texting wasn't around. - Well, I was just gonna say that my next question is gonna be, how did the iPhone and the smartphone change this? Because at this point, it's pretty much all desktops and the people who can afford those heavy laptops.

So it's mainly you're talking about desktop and email, which to anyone who's 21 listening to this is saying, oh, really? You people used to rely on those cranky old things? Can't even imagine. Well, we actually did studies of when do people give? What time of day, what day of the week do people give? And the dominant time period

Was about seven o'clock, six, seven o'clock, depending on what time zone you're in, but it was across the board. So my theory was that people got home from work and they went to check their email because they didn't necessarily have email at work.

And there we were, and I was convinced they all had a glass of wine or something and would sit down and read their email, hear from us, like what they saw, and give us a donation. I mean, that has radically changed. Now, I know just from my experience,

the old days that at one point you used to, after many years of experimentation, you realize that in direct mail, it has to be four pages. It has to be single space. There has to be at least one PS because people may not read the whole thing, but they'll always read the PS, you know, stuff like that. So by 2008, did you kind of have, this is the email format that works to drive dollars? Yeah.

Yes and no. And because digital is so instantaneous and of the moment, formatting is

matters a lot, but changing up the formatting is okay too, because sometimes something really short makes a lot of money. And sometimes you've got to have something really in depth, but you've got to treat the donor as if they are not the village idiot, but a smart person. It's actually going to read what you write. And so content matters.

And that's always been the hallmark of my companies and my philosophy of fundraising. I have tremendous respect for my donor and their intellect. And I want to give them as much information as they need to make their decision. Occasionally, they don't need much information. Something just happened. Give today. That sort of thing. But I think...

Let's jump ahead a little bit. I think that's part of the problem today is we are not treating our donors with enough respect for their knowledge and intellect and involvement. And we must never treat them like an ATM machine, because when you do, you lose them, my opinion. So then, you know, it's 2008, 2010, obviously bad times for Republicans, you know, in 2008 election. But

The iPhone is invented. And, you know, first the iPod and then the iPhone. So suddenly you've got this smartphone where people can, again, 2010 era, 2008 era iPhones are nothing compared to today. But suddenly this whole new way of contacting people, the whole new way that they interface with the Internet begins to change dramatically.

When did you, as an online fundraiser, begin to see this change in your business, and how did you begin to adapt to it? So the one addition to what we're talking about was online advertising. So that was the other way in which we found people, looked for people. We could...

drop cookies and we could do all kinds of things 10 years ago, 15 years ago that we can't do now. So we had the advertising component as well, but it was actually the guys at Facebook, our ad team at Facebook said, listen to us.

You've got to be a mobile first company. And I think that was maybe the first time I actually heard that expression. And they do so much research and they are at the cutting edge of everything that happens. And they said, it's where the internet is.

People are going to be looking and receiving and spending many, many more hours on their mobile devices. So you have to start to design and talk to people in a mobile atmosphere. And that's, I'm trying to remember 2006, 2007, something like that. And so we really did begin to change the way we did things. And instead of looking at how do we present information

a website and how do we go deep on a website so people can scroll around it and this, that, and the other. We stopped thinking so much about that and start thinking about, okay, how are people going to look at this? You know, how do we make our, how do we make the donation form size to the screen in a way that doesn't stop people from giving? I mean, we had done a lot of research, like every time you add a click,

to a donation process, you lose 50% of your donors. So we're trying to take what we've learned on our website and recreate it effectively on a mobile device. And it did take years. You've got to change and look, and you're always testing, and how do people use things? And the way you and I use a device today is not the way somebody who's 18, 19 years old uses a device today.

hell, a seven-year-old. They're so intuitive about what to do and how to do it. So you're trying to design for all ages and all types. And where do you get to the common denominator? And I don't want to say the lowest common denominator because it's not. It's really, but where is the commonality and a sweet spot that you can meet everybody's needs? And that's what the iPhone forced us to do because it's the iPhone. So would you say most people

online contributions today come through a mobile device? I haven't looked at the stats in a while, but yes, they probably was inching up towards two thirds. So think of your own giving patterns. I don't know if you get moved to give money to candidates or you see an ad on TV. Actually, I have not given money to a candidate in over a decade. We need to talk.

Well, in part because of a personal circumstance that meant my money was going to support another person's household. And you all know what I mean, but I won't say the words. But also, I've gotten to be a journalist and an analyst. And I just think, well, you know, I'll give money to a personal friend. That was the last money I gave was to a personal friend that I knew or knew.

her husband was running for race and I'd known her since college. But, you know, other than that, I don't ever want to be in a position where even if it's, you know, look at judge merchant, $25 to Biden. Oh, conflict of interest. I don't ever want to be in a position where somebody says, well, you're saying such and such about a campaign because you're donating. Yeah. You're wise. You're absolutely wise, but thank goodness you are not normal. You are not like the rest of the political population. So what,

if somebody gives you five bucks, they're going to vote for you. Somebody gives you more, they're going to vote for you. It is all about deepening the relationship between the voter and the campaign. And when you forget that this person is a voter, you forget that to your peril. So that's why the fundraising has to be deft. It has to be well thought out. It has to, has to be more than just, you know, pulling in all this money and,

And there are unfortunately some bad actors in our business who make a lot of money off of these campaigns. And it was really part of what factored into my decision to go ahead and sell my company and retire, quote unquote, because I found myself in conflict with the other players in the field that, you

just were taking too much money out of the system, so to speak. It wasn't enough going back to the campaigns.

yeah that's an i mean that was one of the ultimate complaints about direct mail is that you were spending so much churning and in processing and of course what happened was all the direct mail people figured out well if i own a caging company i own a print house and i own a mail house i make the profit here and a profit here and a profit here and use my so i'm making mult the same thing you're telling me is happening in online correct and that's usually in the list business so again

Because McCain 2006 was when we sent out the first solicitation for his 08 campaign. And it was late December and it bombed. And I remember going to the powers that be and saying, we've got a problem here. Nobody's giving. And indeed, his campaign didn't start well early.

And of course there was, it's well known. There was a big shakeup. He fired everybody. People quit. It was just, is he out of the campaign and people that knew John McCain knew that was not going to happen. He just started over and just worked harder than everybody else. But here we had, again, we had no money. So they turned to us to say, okay, what can you guys do? How much more can you step up? How can we fill the void? And we, we,

We invented, for lack of a better description, not even meaning to, just that we needed money. So we invented revenue sharing email, which has gotten to be part of maybe the highest moneymaker net for the political consulting industry in what we do. And it's all born out of...

A guy named Bobby Everly had a list called GOP USA, not a relation of Bruce. Ah, okay. But he had a list that he built, and actually Bruce had helped build that list, of people

Oh, gosh, I can't remember, 100,000, a couple hundred thousand known donors with email addresses. But he didn't have an organization or a campaign or he didn't have anything to talk to these people about. So it came to us, a fellow named Steve Castleton, all of the people that were players came and said, hey, Bobby's got this list. Could we email it with a message from the senator? And

We'll split. I don't even remember what the split was at that point. And you guys get to keep the money that you raise minus X. And we'll take that for our expenses. And we both win. We have a list we can't mail without you. You've got a list you can mail free and keep the money that you raise and the name of the donor. So we didn't know what we were doing.

But that is the biggest part of the business today and that's where people net the most money. And that's part of the problem that we're having with our donor issue because you give money and then all of a sudden you're on all these lists and you get asked for money from everybody. - And to get to your point earlier about respecting the donor,

You know, when you have an email, at least you can make an argument because you have to fill up space. You don't literally say, give me money on the line, give me money. And then you have a click sign. And, you know, so you actually say, dear, blah, blah, blah. Why should you give me money? Yeah. You don't have that space on a text message. So the text. Now, because I don't give I don't get them, but I hear about this and it's all.

The world is ending. I've got this gun next to my temple if you don't send me $10. Obviously, I'm exaggerating, but it's like really apocalyptic stuff, all in short numbers of characters and a link to the give. Is text messaging hurting the online fundraising as it's enriching the online fundraisers?

Yes, and yes, and maybe not in some cases, but it is so immediate. It's in your face. You can't ignore it. You can choose not to open your email, but you're sitting there and that text comes and it's right in your face. And that is how the younger people communicate. They don't talk on the phone. They don't email, but they text. And so in the...

You know you're going to get your message seen, and that's the most important part of what we do. We want to get our message seen. So it's there. It works. It is absolutely the quickest way turnaround to receive contributions. It just is, and it works. And the numbers can be lower. You can get a percentage rate of 2% and 1%. You're making money.

Um, although the cost, having said that the cost of texting is way higher than the cost of email and, uh, you know, rivals the cost of mail, um, depending on who's, who's doing it and what kind of texting you're doing. Um, yeah, mail's more expensive, but it's, it's not cheap. It's not like sending an email, which is a fraction of a penny per email, but it returns and it's instant returns.

So we're coming to the end of our discussion, but I wanted to ask, you get a lot of complaints about scam packs or people who sign up. They think they're giving one time and they actually have signed on to a monthly recurring charge. Yes. Somewhere in my listeners, there's somebody who's nodding their head right now and say, oh, it happened to me. How do prospective or potential donors spot potential

scams or carefully, even if it's not a scam directly in the sense that it's actually a real thing, how do you protect yourself in what may no longer be the wild west, but is definitely a place that needs our friends from law and order to police the streets? I love that. So it's called the pre-checked box. And, uh,

You have to look for it on the donation page. The biggest abusers of the pre-checked box are the committees.

But the party committees or the candidates? Yes, the party committees. Sorry, the Senate, the House, the RNC, the DNC, all of the committees, because they are rapacious and aggressive and they've got to raise a lot of money and they have very confined time periods in which they can raise it. So they are probably the most aggressive of all the fundraisers. And they've made many of them have made a deliberate decision.

to put that pre-check box there because they'd rather have the money and deal with the grief later on because they don't live on in perpetuity. They have a two-year defined cycle, beginning, middle, end, that's it, and then they start over with new people. So your donor should look at the donation page itself to see if there's a box that is pre-checked saying make this a recurring donation, take $10 from me every month, blah, blah, blah, and just uncheck it.

Okay. It's just like when you're going on and you're buying something, there's always a pre-check box that says you consent to receiving marketing communications. And you always uncheck that unless you really do want to get 50%.

50 million in marketing and communication. And you really don't. So you need to do that for political fundraising, too. Absolutely. The individual campaigns tend to not do that because they are much more respectful of their donors. But that's how your people should look and make sure it's a one-time gift and one-time gift only.

Okay, catching scam packs. There are some. And a couple of people have gone to jail. So I don't want to say that you shouldn't be looking out for them. But blessedly, Henry, they really are fewer and far between than people think they are. Oh, well, that's good. It is. You know, watch out for things like if somebody's asking for a 10-time match or a 15-time match or a 5-time match,

They don't really exist. It used to early on. We had to find money from a donor. You go to a major donor and say, OK, can you give me five thousand dollars? And so we can match it and we could send out an email and tell the truth. And if you responded that email in the match, we could take the money from the donor, the big donor, and go ahead and match that. Just not happening.

So I would be leery, weary, and not give if somebody's writing that kind of message. We just have to stop that. So this is a little bit of a plug, but the American Association of Political Consultants took this issue very, very seriously, and we have just put out a best practices article.

And if a donor is really interested, you can go to the AAPC.org and look and download the fundraising best practices and then ask the campaigner, are you following these? Is this what you do? And you can look at the solicitation you got. And if it's a no-no, then I probably wouldn't give those people money. Next, if people want to have their money make the most money for the campaign, they need to go to the campaign's website.

Nobody else is involved in taking any of that contribution but the campaign. So if you're getting a third party email or you may have somebody else involved in a, you may have a list that's being shared this, that and the other where your $100 donation, you may be giving $10 to the campaign when all is said and done.

So if you really want to maximize it, go directly to the campaign website. You can look it up. You can search it in Google and make the donation directly. Is there anything else that wary donors ought to know? And is there, you know, there's always new scams or new things on the good or the bad. What does the next five years look like for online fundraising?

So I think we'll continue to see the rise of texting, although the texting platforms don't love us. The head of one of the major telephone companies, phone companies, said, we're not going to let you ruin texting the way you ruined phone calls because who answers their phone?

You know, that just doesn't happen. And so they are way more concerned about regulating us or creating a price point where only serious and on the level people are participating. We're not there yet, but the texting, I think, will continue to be the vehicle of choice for

And we will police that and monitor ourselves better than maybe we're doing now. There are all kinds of programs being proposed. And if we do our best practices correctly, we're all going to be better in the long run because people will want to participate. They'll want to give and they won't feel as if they've just given their phone away when they receive 150 texts from people that they don't know.

Well, I'm just waiting for in the future when virtual reality goggles are the thing that I'll be walking down the street, or probably not me, but my kids will be walking down the street and suddenly give to the candidate will pop up on their ice cream. The candidate will walk into it and say, Henry, we

We could do that now if we wanted to. Henry, I need your help. Will you make a donation today? That's the kind of stuff you'll see. You've got to have a female candidate dressed up like Princess Leia. And she kneels and she stands up and she says...

Help me. And then you put in the name for Obi-Wan Kenobi. I need your help. You're going to see all kinds of things like that that you're not even imagining now. And hopefully we'll do it tastefully and in a way in which we honor our donors because we can't run campaigns without them.

It's a symbiotic relationship. You want a good candidate to run, you have to support him financially, and we have to be grateful, thankful, and respectful of your donation. Becky, I'm waiting for the Hollywood movie to come out about your way in which you personally change campaigns in America. But as always, insightful, delightful, and thank you for joining me on Beyond the Polls. Thank you, Henry. I love to be with you.

I'm Victoria Cash. Thanks for calling the Lucky Land Hotline. If you feel like you do the same thing every day, press 1. If you're ready to have some serious fun for the chance to redeem some serious prizes, press 2. We heard you loud and clear. So go to LuckyLandSlots.com right now and play over 100 social casino-style games for free. Get lucky today.

at LuckyLandSlots.com. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void or prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. Well, any candidate running their first time for office needs to get their name out, and they need to identify that name and their persona with particular issues that resonate with their voters. That's what this ad tries to do big time. Let's listen to Sean Tiffany's ad for the Kansas 2 Republican primary. Hey, everybody.

Every day, he's up well before dawn. Christian conservative with cowboy brawn. John Tiffany pulls on his boots and gets ready to fight. Taking care of cattle, putting up with no bull. Big Sean's a rhino's nightmare. No, that's right. Big Sean had enough of the illegals, socialist, all Biden stuff. So he decided to take his cowboy fight to D.C. Big Sean.

He'll push them hard and with our vote, build a wall, make a taller hell. He'll build a moat, keep our families free. Stop China from grabbing Kansas land. Help President Trump make his stand. Fight the rhinos until they're gone. Nobody better mess with Big Sean. Republican Sean Tiffany, cowboy for Congress. I'm Sean Tiffany and I approve this message.

Well, I think you can guess why I'm interested in this ad. It's a minute long, which is twice as long as usual, but they use the time well. First of all, they establish a memorable persona. Big Sean, as you hear six different times throughout the commercial, is a Western cowboy who, as they say, takes no bull. The pictures are of him in cowboy gear riding horses.

herding cattle. In other words, this is not a regular politician. This is a guy who is, well, you know, maybe he's the Kansas version of John Dutton from Yellowstone. I mean, heaven forbid that they would rip that motif off. But you also have nice little things that I like. When they hear, you hear the name Big Sean, what happens is a

icon comes on screen that says in big red letters with a kind of Western motif, fonts is Big Sean. You see and hear that six times, once every 10 seconds.

That helps with mnemonics. You want to get the name out. It's hard to get the name out if somebody doesn't remember the name. Because they put it in not quite a song, but if you listen carefully, the guy doing the voiceover is speaking in rhyme. He's telling a Western story. And every time he does a couple of couplets, it goes to the chorus. Big.

Big Sean. So you've got the name being mentioned in the couplets. You've got Big Sean being the name that's driven home. You have pleasant visuals. And then you have the identification with issues. Immigration, China, Trump.

fighting rhinos. And in one part, when he talks about family strong, they're holding hands, he and his kids, around a table, which is meant to send a message that these are Christian praying conservatives without actually using the phrase. They also have pictures of Biden and Harris that's meant to show who he's going to fight against, as well as those pesky rhinos. Somebody who has

Herd cattle can clearly clear the fields of rhinos, right? He's a cowboy. He's Big Sean. Another thing I like about it is the name is visually portrayed throughout most of the commercial. When Big Sean isn't on the screen, the name Sean Tiffany with a cowboy or a bull with long horns in the corner between the name Sean and Tiffany is

So that as they're talking and you don't have Big Sean on the screen, you see Sean Tiffany. Again, it's just the mnemonics of having a name being said, having a name being there. This is a name ID ad on steroids. That's why I like this, is you've got a clever thing that's going to break through the humdrum of the normal bio ad. You've got

A memorable couplet. You've got a memorable motif. Big Sean. Who doesn't want to vote for Big Sean? This is a conservative district. It has Topeka and it has a lot of Kansas City, but the Republican voters aren't in Kansas City and they're not as much

in Topeka, which is the state capital. They're mainly in the rural counties, and boy, are there a lot of them. This is an ad that is finely crafted in terms of its message. It is an ad that has good production values. It is an ad that stands out from your typical bio. I don't know if Sean Tiffany is going to be the next congressman from this safe red district in central eastern Kansas, but I do know that people are going to be talking

about Sean Tiffany in that district. That's what an ad is supposed to do, and that's why it's this week's Ad of the Week. That's it for this week. Join me early next week as I get ahead of the July 4th holiday with a special episode on Britain's upcoming vote. Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we journey beyond the polls. I'm Victoria Cash, and I want to invite you to a place called Lucky Land.

where you can play over 100 social casino-style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. So what are you waiting for? The best way to discover your luck is to spin. So go to LuckyLandSlots.com. That's LuckyLandSlots.com. And get lucky today at Lucky Land. No purchase necessary. VTW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply.