- Did you get a lot of political fundraising texts in the last election?

- I did.

- It was nonstop.

- A bunch.

- I probably got like 60 texts a day.

- Did any of them work?

Did you end up donating as a result?

- No.

- No.

- In order to run for office candidates need money, which is why, at some point, you've probably gotten a political fundraising text.

Maybe you donate or unsubscribe or take a screenshot of your snarky reply to show Instagram how fun you are, which I've done.

But if you feel like you're getting more texts than normal, you are.

In 2022, the number of political fundraising texts hit 15 million.

How are these people getting your number and where is this money going?

By the end of this, I promise you'll have a better understanding of why Martin Sheen or Hulk Hogan or whoever is asking for your hard earned cash.

I'm Ben Sheehan, and this is "Civics Made Easy."

To start, you kind of did this to yourself.

If you're a registered voter, your contact information is on file with your state or county elections office, and political parties, campaigns, and fundraising groups have access to it.

And if you've previously donated to a candidate or group, your info is in database somewhere because you've been tagged by a data firm as someone who donates.

See, third-party data brokers build profiles of people who are more likely to give money to politics.

According to the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, the government agency that monitors our communication like TV and satellite and radio, calls and texts that ask for political donations are exempt from the National Do Not Call Registry.

And while a political candidate or group needs your permission before auto-dialing you using software to randomly generate your phone number and contact you, if they get your number from a list, say, one put together by a data broker, they don't need your permission.

And you can thank the Supreme Court for that.

In their unanimous decision in Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, the justice has ruled that while it's illegal to auto-dial or auto-text you without your consent, if a company is contacting you without automatically generating your number, then it's not illegal.

And unlike your friend putting you on a group text without asking, people who mass text in a business sense have to follow some rules.

They have to let you unsubscribe by replying, "Stop," and they can't impersonate another business or group.

If you think a text you got is doing that, you can report it by forwarding it to 7726.

This reports it to the FEC, the Federal Election Commission.

But let's step back.

How did we even get to this point with political fundraising?

When did fundraising and campaigning start?

It might surprise you that campaigns and fundraising are not in our constitution.

Back then, it was tacky to announce people were running for office, so mostly rich dudes ran and self-funded their campaigns, which let's be honest still happens.

But the first presidential candidate to campaign as we know it today was Andrew Jackson.

In 1828, 4 years after a stinging loss, Jackson ran again, but this time, with campaign offices, print media behind him and supporters holding events for him across the country.

He was also the first candidate to appear on campaign buttons, and while he didn't make fundraising pitches himself, his supporters did.

Jackson's campaign raised a million dollars, which today would be 30 billion.

At the time, it was a massive amount, but compared to 2020 when the Biden campaign became the first to raise a billion dollars, it's not.

After Jackson set that precedent, future candidates followed his lead.

And by the 1900s, candidates were raising and spending as much as $16 million.

Voters noticed.

They didn't love it.

Starting in 1867 and continuing sporadically for 100 years, Congress passed a handful of campaign finance laws.

It banned corporations from giving money to campaigns in 1907 and unions from doing that in 1943.

To get around this ban, unions created PACs, Political Action Committees, which are technically separate groups and gave to campaigns through those.

But things came to a head in 1972, when burglars broke into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington D.C..

The resulting scandal and investigation, known as Watergate, led to the discovery of illegal contributions to Nixon's reelection.

In response, Congress created the FEC in 1974, the Federal Election Commission, to better enforce campaign finance laws.

The commission has six members where more than three can't be from the same party and four votes are needed to make a decision, forcing them to be bipartisan.

In the years since there have been more laws in Supreme Court rulings dealing with campaign finance, often creating new norms and new loopholes.

For example, Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which among other things, now requires candidates to put their names on their ads, like this.

- [George] I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message.

- To get a better understanding of how political donations work, I decided it was time to meet with an expert in D.C.. Ellen Weintraub is the former chair of the Federal Election Commission.

I guess I'd like to start by asking you what the FEC does.

- The FEC monitors money and politics.

We don't run the elections.

We don't count the votes.

All we do is monitor the money.

But there is quite a lot of money in politics, so there is enough to do right there.

- How does the FEC enforce violations of campaign finance law?

- Anybody can file a complaint.

Our lawyers will look at every single complaint.

They will present a recommendation to the commission, and the commission will vote on whether to move forward with that complaint.

- How often do people actually paying financial penalties and I mean, has anyone recently been prosecuted with an actual crime by the Justice Department for violating these laws?

- Yes, absolutely.

You may recall a certain congressman named Santos who are rather a former congressman.

- I do.

I remember him now.

- He was prosecuted by the Justice Department for campaign finance violations, among other things.

- What do you think the FEC does particularly well and is there anything you think it could improve upon?

- I think that we do a really good job at disclosure.

It is the core mission of the agency, is making sure that the American people are well-informed about who's spending money in politics.

What do we do a less good job of?

I think that we should be doing more on the enforcement side.

- How much money can you legally give directly to a candidate running for president?

- Maybe a couple thousand dollars.

I couldn't put an exact number on it, but I'm not sure.

- It might be more for president, but I think it's at least 6,000 for the primary and 6,000 for the general.

- I mean, theoretically, I guess, however much they want.

- How do political donations work today?

There are lots of ways that an individual like yourself can donate to politics.

Now, this next part is dense, so I'm gonna explain as simply as I can, while occasionally throwing a stack of money in the air.

The first way for a person like you to donate is by giving to a campaign.

In 2025 and 2026, you can give someone running for president or Congress a max of $7,000, half of that in the primaries and half during the general election.

And that amount goes up in every odd numbered year to keep up with inflation.

The second way is by giving to a Political Action Committee.

A regular PAC, not a super one, collects and distributes money to candidates.

You can give a federal PAC up to $5,000 a year and they can give that same amount directly to a candidate.

Why not give that candidate the money yourself?

Well, PACs do research about how candidates feel on different issues and follow many races across the country with polling to see who has the best chance of winning.

So if you wanna affect a particular cause or issue or party, but you don't have time to do all that research, a PAC can be helpful.

A third way is by contributing to a political party.

You can give a state party like the North Carolina Libertarian Party up to $10,000 a year, but you can give a federal political party, meaning at the national level, way more.

As an individual, you can give the National Republican Party, your Green Party, or whomever, a total of $44,300.

Federal or national parties also have additional accounts that handle things like their convention, legal fees, and rent for office buildings.

You can give each of those accounts an additional $132,900 a year.

Stephen Accounting says, "Stop doing that with our petty cash."

Lastly, let's say you have unlimited money, which must be nice, and you wanna give as much as you can to help one party's candidate for president.

Here's how much you can legally give: $7,000 directly to the campaign, $44,300 to the candidate's national party, $10,000 to each of that party's state parties, so 50 plus D.C., and $132,900 to each of the national party's three additional accounts for their rent, convention, and legal fees, for a total of $960,000.

And if that's not enough for you, you can give another $44,300 to the parties group that helps its US House races, another 44,300 to the group that helps its Senate races, and an additional $132,900 to each of those group's rent accounts and legal accounts, for a grand total of $1,580,200.

All of this money goes directly to a campaign or political party.

In other words, I'm not including super PACs or 501 groups, which are also called dark money.

Let's say 1.6 million isn't enough, you're a billionaire.

Well, you're in luck, because there are ways to give with no limits.

One, as I've mentioned, is a super PAC.

What is a super PAC?

- I have no idea.

- I think they're pretty much like a special interest group.

- It's like a donor base, right?

- I'm not sure.

- Unlike a regular PAC that collects and gives money to candidates with limits, a super PAC can raise and spend unlimited money as long as it does not coordinate that spending with a candidate or campaign.

The Supreme Court's logic in allowing this is that money is speech, and if you wanna spend a billion dollars on TV ads saying why your candidate is good and another one is bad, you should be allowed to do that.

- What the court said was that if money is given to an independent spending group, then there's no possibility of corruption, so there can't be any limits on how much money goes into these political committees.

There's still political committees they still have to disclose to us, but there are no limits on amounts and they're allowed to accept labor union and corporate contributions, which candidates and party committees are not.

- In 2020, super PACs raised more than $2 billion and spent half of that, leaving a lot of money for future elections.

And 501 groups can also raise and spend unlimited amounts as long as political activity is not their primary purpose.

s, as they're known, are also nonprofits, which means they don't pay taxes.

And they're called dark money groups because they don't have to disclose their donors.

And because, let's be honest, it sounds cool and mysterious.

How are you able to know if somebody is donating money who legally shouldn't be if they're not disclosing who gives them money?

- That does raise a serious problem in the way the whole campaign finance system is set up now because these 501 organizations are generally corporations, so they're not allowed to give directly to candidates or party committees.

They can give to super PACs.

We probably could go further in trying to ensure the kind of transparency that I think the American people really deserve.

They deserve to know where the money's coming from and where the money's going and who is trying to influence their politics.

And the Supreme Court has, in fact, robustly endorsed that as a principle.

- In 2020, dark money groups spend more than 1 billion dollars, and a lot of that went to super PACs.

And lastly, everything I just described is mostly spending on federal elections.

I'm not including money spent on governor's races or state House or state Senate seats.

The limits on those vary massively from state to state.

Some have limits below the federal level.

For example, Colorado lets you donate at most $2,500 to someone running for governor, less than half of what you can give a candidate for president, while other states have no limits.

In these 12 states, an individual like yourself can give as much as you want directly to someone running for governor, state attorney general, or other state-level office.

And in these five states, if you're a corporation, you can give unlimited money directly to candidates running for state office.

If some corporation wants to make you governor of Nebraska, it could launch a billion dollar ad campaign starring you.

Not that a company would do that, but if it happens, I want a commission.

Now that you're likely feeling nauseous, I'll end by giving you something that costs nothing that has an unlimited potential for a return on investment: Hope.

Money doesn't vote.

People do.

You can hit every contribution limit, spend every dollar you have, but at the end of the day, money has to convince people to vote a certain way.

Now, does money help?

Of course.

It gets out the word, pays for polling and campaign staff and yard signs.

It blasts the airwaves with your message and it clogs up our inboxes and mailboxes.

But it doesn't always mean success.

In 2016, the Clinton campaign raised almost twice as much money as the Trump campaign, but Donald Trump won.

In 2018, in the Democratic primary in New York's 14th Congressional District, representative Joe Crowley raised more than $3 million.

His challenger, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, raised 300,000.

That's a 10 to 1 difference, and AOC won by 15 points.

Finally, if you only remember one thing from what I said, make it this: Unlike buying a vacuum with a year warranty, if you donate to a candidate and you don't like what they do when they take office, you have to wait till next election at least two years to fix it.

So spend wisely.

I'm Ben Sheehan and I hope you learn something.

I have one final question.

Is there anything that you can do to help us get fewer fundraising text messages on a daily basis?

- I'm afraid not.

- That's not what I wanted to hear.

For more episodes of "Civics Made Easy," subscribe to the PBS YouTube channel.

You can also DM me anytime on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube.

I promise there are no stupid questions.

One more for the road.

God, that's fun.