Fetterman's campaign warned donors about a scam last weekend. It wasn't Mehmet Oz who was leveling the charge. Fetterman's campaign manager, Brendan McPhillips, laid into what he called a "sCAM PAC" that was using John's name and likeness to raise money. The money raised by these people goes to John and our campaign. Thousands of donors are being tricked out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is wrong and it puts us at a huge disadvantage. The Democratic Coalition launched an ad in support of their candidate the week before McPhillips objected. Super PACs are not allowed to contribute directly to Fetterman's campaign or coordinate with his campaign. It's rare that a campaign would use its platform to call out someone. The Democratic Coalition ruffled feathers in the past. Several progressive operatives have accused the group of soliciting money from liberals only to spend it on its own operations. McPhillips told grifters to go and find out. The group says the super PAC has been transparent with donors and is only interested in helping Democrats.
The Democratic Coalition launched as the Democratic Coalition Against Trump in 2016 as part of a wave of similar minded organizations looking to harness the #Resistance energy that animated critics of the then-president.
Scott Dworkin runs it as the Democratic Coalition. One of the largest grassroots Resistance operations in the country is what the group says. A landing page for the group on the ActBlue platform says the group plans to produce ads to support Democrats in competitive races, level hard-hitting opposition research against Republicans across the country, and lead an online organizing operation.
The Democratic Coalition and Dworkin both have social media feeds that are similar to a progressive red meat content farm.
Fetterman was portrayed in a video as a champion of the working class who would act as a bulwark against encroachings on democracy, women's rights and health care.
The group's goal is to reach as many voters as possible through organic social media every day of the year.
The majority of the $350,000 raised by the group came from small-dollar donors, according to FEC filings. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, the committee spent $73,000 but did not support or oppose federal candidates.
6 percent is the amount of money the super PAC spent on Facebook ads. In the past 30 days, the group has dropped another $900 on the platform, but those ads only began to mention specific candidates and target users in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
More than half of the $330,000 in disbursements has gone to the committee's employees or firms run by them.
A fifth of the Democratic Coalition's spending this cycle has gone to a firm founded by Dworkin. In previous cycles, the group sent more than that. The Democratic Coalition has been the firm's only client in the last year.
Through the end of August, Sonya McGrady has taken in $50,000 of the committee's expenditures. Senior adviser Sam Jones and the digital consulting firm of another senior adviser, Chuck Westover, have been paid tens of thousands of dollars by the Democratic Coalition.
Dworkin said that the small amount of money raised by the group has helped Democratic campaigns and causes. Over the years, our group's messaging has driven billions of impressions and we have built a massive megaphone to amplify our allies, which we will continue to use for years to come.
The nature of the Democratic Coalition's work doesn't translate well into FEC's reporting requirements He said that most of their expenses are labor related because they are active on social networks every day.
He said that organic activity for candidates doesn't meet the reporting requirement because it's based on earned social media reach.
In the case of the Fetterman video, Dworkin said the goal was to fire up base voters in Pennsylvania, and that the video peaked at #8 on the national stage. He said it cost $2,000 to produce the ad. He compared it to a campaign that would have cost six figures to take over the social networking site.
Dworkin said the super PAC raised only $280 from the video, which asked viewers to help swing the election. He pointed out that the group sent a link to donate to Fetterman's campaign to its half million followers. Before McPhillips went after the group, that happened.
Though Fetterman's campaign cast the group as a scam, there are no legal requirements that spell out what percentage of a group's spending must be used for political purposes.
Political action committees have been able to engage in conduct ranging from apparent self-dealing to actual fraud, which the federal government has only recently begun to mobilize in earnest to combat.
The FBI is warning would-be donors to be on the lookout for such schemes because they have flourished on both sides of the political spectrum.
For First Amendment reasons and others, political action committees have a fair amount of flexibility in how they spend their money.
It is up to donors to decide where they want to send their money. A working group made recommendations to the FEC last year. Ensuring donors are better informed about the political activities of the committee they want to donate to is one of the proposals. None of the proposals have been voted on by the campaign finance watchdog.
Even when the group in question is an ally, politicians have taken it upon themselves to try and block other groups from trying to profit off their name and likeness. The Republican National Committee ignored a cease-and-desist demand from the former president to stop using his name and likeness.
A senior Fetterman aide wouldn't say if the campaign would issue a request to the Democratic Coalition, but said that they had told the group to go fuck themselves.
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