Or, "We underperformed! This is a crisis! Send us your property deed!"
Fundraising is completely shameless. I made the mistake of contributing to one grassroots group early in the 2016 nom cycle and by the end I swear I was getting begging (or threatening) letters from thirty different sources.
I learned my lesson in donating years ago. Bob Graham was running for President in 2004 and was sponsoring a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series driver I was rooting for. His campaign promised that for each $80 donation, you would get a die-cast model of the truck (don't judge me, I have a collection of NASCAR diecasts still in their boxes from a decade ago).
Cool, I'm still a noob on politics, but I kinda like the guy, what he's campaigning about, and it's a way to get a rare collectable diecast truck of a driver I root for. So I put a donation down for two trucks on my credit card mid-summer.
His campaign folds at the end of the NASCAR Truck Series season (October 2004), and a notice is sent right around the election that the die-cast truck order isn't happening. Anyone who donated solely because of the trucks has not and will not get charged.
Okay, fine, I wont be getting the trucks.
I'm confused when I get my December credit card statement. I was charged $160 by the campaign. Call the credit card company. Explain what happened. They reverse the charge and just ask to have me email them the correspondence stating no charges would be made to those who are only donating to get a diecast truck. I send them the email.
Then I get my January statement. Bob Graham's campaign tried to charge me the $160 again. I again call the CC company, they see the note in my file and reverse the December charge.
My February statement arrives. Same $160 charge again. Call the CC. They again reverse the charge and tell me that they are going to monitor my account for me. There have been others with this CC company with the same problems from the Bob Graham campaign.
March statement, no charges. Whew. Drama over.
Nope. Early April, I *get* a phone call from the CC company.
Bob Graham's campaign tried for a *fourth* time to charge the account. They're proactively cancelling my card number and moving my account to a new one and if the campaign tries to charge the old number again, they have a very solid case to bring to the FEC. I was one of many people that had this happen to them with this CC company alone.
TL;DR: Learned my lesson to never donate to a political campaign; yet I have an FEC record on my name that shows four separate donations of $160 each for the 2004 Presidential Election thanks to Bob Graham's campaign attempting fraud.
