TOTALLY OPEN THREAD, feel free to skip to comments if you don’t care about ActBlue, and even if you do!
One stop shopping?
Act Blue Expands Its Mission
ActBlue started out as a clearinghouse so Democrats could donate easily to the candidates of their choice. It worked well and has been the biggest clearinghouse for Democrats for multiple decades. It works especially well for smaller campaigns that don’t have the infrastructure big campaigns do.
Now ActBlue is expanding. It bought Impactive, a company that has tools for canvassing, phone banking, and other forms of voter outreach. The goal is to become one-stop-shopping for small-to-medium campaigns, like House campaigns and many state offices. This will give Democratic candidates for many lower offices tools that previously were available only to top-of-the-line campaigns.
ActBlue has become a sufficiently powerful player that Donald Trump is starting to go after it. He claims (with no evidence, as usual) that ActBlue is not doing enough to stop straw-man donations from foreign sources. Specifically, it is illegal for a foreign person, organization, or government to give money to an American citizen with the specific purpose that the American then donate the money to a political campaign, thus making it look like the donation is legal. There is no evidence that this is happening at more than a microscopic scale, if that much. It is like talking about noncitizen voting. There is almost none of it but Republicans make it sound like it is an epidemic.
Democrats are asking why Trump is not going after WinRed, the Republicans’ donation clearing house. It is worth noting that ActBlue is a nonprofit and very efficient whereas WinRed is a commercial, profit-making company and more interested in its take from the donations than what the campaigns get.
from electoral-vote.com a few days ago.
h/t dnfree
Totally open thread.
First They Came for Jim Comey and I Said Nothing Because He Has Caused So Much Damage In the Past
gratuitous
Cole still married, yes? And they said it wouldn’t last! Mazel tov to the happy couple.
WaterGirl
@gratuitous: Yes!
I think we’ll have the zoom recording available by the end of next week.
kindness
Most of my donations go through ActBlue. I started getting cold call texts pleading for money and initially blamed ActBlue for selling my data. They didn’t. What they have to do is list my data in filings with the government and all these shitty orgs bought copies from the government filings and are using that. I block ’em all, then mark as spam and delete them. Guess I should have gotten a burner phone to use for ActBlue. Oh well. Happy Friday all.
rikyrah
Chris Towler
@blkprofcct
Just a reminder, Harris took over a sinking ship & nearly brought Dems a victory in what was otherwise an impossible situation.
Harris changed the political playing field for Black voters – her candidacy increased Black vote share AND turnout across every demographic group!!!
x.com/blkprofcct/status/1971006973605970151
stinger
WaterGirl, whether intentional or not, several of the recent sidebar photos have been of a path through woods or garden, and as much as I love “path” images for their own sake, just now they are also symbols of the new life journey we are celebrating on behalf of JG and Joelle. Thank you!
Lily
@WaterGirl: that’s good news. thanks.
rikyrah
Will 🦥 Menaker
@willmenaker
A whole lot of responses are like “why don’t they ever protest Trump??” when he’s considering pursuing charges against Code Pink for interrupting his dinner at a DC restaurant.
11:39 AM · Sep 25, 2025
x.com/willmenaker/status/1971253171193552990
Tim
@trouble_man90
“We’re afraid of trump, but feel safe and comfortable harassing democrats”
A rare moment of truth from the lying left.
x.com/trouble_man90/status/1971393633749520395
stinger
Good for ActBlue — small campaigns really need such tools. And the article makes an excellent point about the differences between ActBlue and WinRed (who couldn’t even come up with an original name and just copied and slightly modified the name of the liberal version. Republicans really are not very creative).
catfishncod
1) Mazel tov!
2) The post before this can be summed up as: Karma is not justice.
3) I know, economies of scale and all that, but for resilience’s sake, doesn’t it make sense to clone ActBlue’s operations? I am getting deeply allergic to point-failure sources in the body politic.
Gloria DryGarden
@rikyrah: I find this very uplifting. Thank you for commenting with this.
Any tidbits that build up a positive outlook!
Watergirl, this is such excellent news that actblue now can help all those campaigns so powerfully.
Joy in FL
I am glad to know ActBlue is expanding when threatened by the bully. It’s a model for me.
rikyrah
@Gloria DryGarden:
255,000
that’s the number for me.
over 7 states, the difference between what could have been and our current Hellscape.
THAT is not a mandate for the other side.
Baud
@Joy in FL:
Agreed.
Gloria DryGarden
@rikyrah: …”feel safe and comfortable harassing democrats”
Get off on…
Enjoy them as a place to dump our fears and anger…(cheaper than therapy, less painful than introspection)
feel superior and powerful, for once, when we get the chance to…
grrr.
@catfishncod: great summary. The karma department functions outside of our purview, and on a different time line, and may take longer than the justice department, but I’m counting on that karma. (Even though it’s none of my business)
Andrya
I feel bad about saying this, but my first reaction to this post was “agggghhh, NO!”.
The reason- in 2024 I stretched myself to give as much as I could afford to Democratic candidates. A bit over $13K to a lot of different candidates.
I have two phones, one for my private life and another backup phone for students, commercial transactions, etc.
Since 2024, my backup phone has been unusable due to more than 100 texts per day from Democratic candidates/campaigns requesting money, Often, multiple requests from one campaign in a single day! If I just quickly read each text and then delete it it would take more than two hours per day. I have no choice but to do bulk deletes- but that has caused me to lose messages that I needed to see.
Supposedly, you can put a stop to texting hell by replying “STOP” but that hasn’t worked for me. In return, I get a statement “no more texts from this phone” but I get just as many texts from the same campaign, just from different phones.
The idea that ActBlue (which I still support) is “expanding voter outreach” fills me with horror.
Has anyone else had this problem?
ETA: I see that kindness beat me to it.
Redshift
@kindness:
If you reply “stop” to the texts, the organization that sent it is legally required to stop texting you. (Learned that in my text banking training.) It doesn’t stop all organizations, just the specific one, but I find it works pretty well.
I wish I’d set up a separate email for campaign stuff, though. There’s no legal requirement for them to stop spamming you there, unfortunately.
Ghost of Joe Lebling’s Dog
All good wishes to Joelle and John, for keeps.
zhena gogolia
@rikyrah: Bingo!
H.E.Wolf
Thank you, dnfree and WaterGirl!
Electoral-Vote.com is a good daily resource for me. For the most part, their hair is not on fire; and their snark is.
Gloria DryGarden
@rikyrah: that’s the total margin of voters, in the 7 swing states?
I still wonder about numbers tampering at the electronic level, in the data machines, not the voting machines.
[Although, I did see my vote tampered with in an electronic voting booth: I proofread my whole ballot before I pulled the lever, because we get to vote on so many candidates and 10-20 ballot issues every time, and it showed I was voting for Bush. I most certainly did not. I had pressed the button for the democratic candidate. Glad I was rechecking things; that was unnerving and a tad alarming]. So grateful for mail in /drop off paper ballots across my state.
Miss Bianca
@Andrya: I guess I must have gotten off easy – I stopped some ActBlue contributions after the election, got pretty ruthless about deleting/texting STOP to annoying text begs, and they’ve virtually disappeared off my screen. Get a few now and then still.
But then, I wasn’t donating nearly as much money as you appear to have been…maybe that has something to do with it?
piratedan
just a reminder, that we still have a mid-atlantic jackal get together at my place on Oct 11.
If you are in the area and so inclined, please RSVP to WG at her blog e-mail and she will forward said e-mail deets to me and I will provide you with an address/directions for said congretational location.
dogs and cats will be provided for pets and pictures…
hope to see you there so we can all put faces to blog handles and share in our mutual joy and political outrage.
rekoob
Some mildly interesting data:
vpap.org/elections/early-voting/2025-november-general-election
The headline is that Early Voting is up significantly over 2021 (the last Virginia state government general elections). The Republicans are noting that there’s heavy turnout in red districts, but I’m thinking that heavy turnout there is mostly voting blue.
I voted in Richmond this past Tuesday and took two others with me. We all voted for Abigail Spanberger and her team!
Melancholy Jaques
@kindness:
I do the same as you with nearly all of my donations going through Act Blue as well as delete and mark as spam every other request for money.
There are campaigns that have totally wasted the generosity of us small time donors. Sara Gideon is the example that still pisses me off when I think about it. I don’t think it was deliberate or corruption, just incompetence plus consultant disease. That campaign had millions they knew they were not going to be able to spend, but they were still sending out daily pleas for donations.
Baud
@rekoob:
I wonder about increases in early voting. Could reflect greater interest, or it could reflect that more people are getting used to and using early voting.
Hungry Joe
POSTCARD UPDATE
Postcards for Yes on Prop. 50, California’s Election Rigging Response Act:
Yesterday: 6 Total so far: 74 To go: 26
Election Day is Nov. 4
BANNER UPDATE
We weren’t actually counting, but our Wednesday banner drop (RESIST TRUMP/ CLIMATE ACTION / SD350.ORG) over I-5 seemed to produce a lot more honks and friendly waves than usual. And the guys — it’s almost always guys — flipping us off seemed angrier than usual.
Gloria DryGarden
@Redshift: the campaign emails and money request emails have been so (expletive) numerous.
It’s taking a lot of time to delete them all; doing it via search terms and select All isn’t working well, as it pulls up news summary emails I hadn’t wanted to delete. And folks using yahoo know, they are cracking down on excess email storage. This is now in my top 10 very urgent tasks to manage.
Good luck to us all with the excess repeat emails and texts
rikyrah
The Washington Post
@washingtonpost
President Trump instructed top prosecutors in a memo to pursue the death penalty “to the maximum degree practicable” in D.C., his latest move to exert control over law enforcement in the city.
x.com/washingtonpost/status/1971575688613245196
Ruckus
@stinger:
Republicans really are not very creative).
They don’t need to be, today they sell one human emotion and nothing else – hate for anyone not them. They used to at least have a concept of an operational government, not a good one mind you but still, far better than today.
WaterGirl
@stinger: You caught me!
That was not coincidence.
rikyrah
Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
Rep. Mikie Sherrill: “My opponent and the Trump administration will stop at nothing. They will completely weaponize the federal government to achieve what they want. We saw it with Comey and we’re seeing it here, releasing all of my records.”
x.com/atrupar/status/1971585243334205817
Baud
@rikyrah:
Hopefully, NJ Dems will have enough pride to turn out in massive numbers.
rikyrah
Seung Min Kim
@seungminkim
JERUSALEM (AP) — In ‘unprecedented operation,’ Israeli army takes over mobile phones of Gaza residents to carry Netanyahu UN speech live.
8:32 AM · Sep 26, 2025
x.com/seungminkim/status/1971568638579618137
Noga Tarnopolsky נגה טרנופולסקי نوغا ترنوبولسكي
@NTarnopolsky
💥The cynicism of Netanyahu’s order to broadcast his speech in Gaza, the cynicism of his lie about their placement, the cynicism of claiming to address the hostages while, in reality, forcing Gazans to listen to his speech, as if he were a conquering general…
x.com/NTarnopolsky/status/1971580874849448182
WaterGirl
@Baud: And pissed off veterans of all stripes!
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I know there are some excellent vets out there, but given how Trump has treated vets over the last decade, I have to believe we’ve capped out with the vets.
But I’ll have my fingers crossed.
H.E.Wolf
@Hungry Joe: Congratulations on the friendly reactions to the banner, and congratulations on the impressive postcard total!
I’m finishing a small batch of GOTV postcards and will request more this weekend.
It feels good to lend a hand.
Ruckus
@Ruckus:
My concept of why is that as the population of this country grew and the concept of public communications has grown (what we are doing here) and that has changed a lot of modern life. Communication over just the neighbors back fence is old news, today we can communicate, as we are doing here, most everywhere. That is a huge change. It also increases communication on both sides of the political aisle. We get to communicate our better, but they get to communicate their worst. Still looks like a draw to me, but here’s the thing, how many want everyone else to just suck it up and be governed by pure shit walking? I’d bet it’s not a majority. I also wonder how legitimate voting actually is in some parts of this country. There seems to be, in some parts, a strong, one sided concept that the past was better, where everyone knew their place. This of course is bullshit of the highest order, especially in a democracy where EVERYONE is supposed to be equal and where in some areas power is politically completely one sided. Usually the money side.
Jackie
@Baud:
I’m hoping Vets will follow the saying “fool me twice… NEVER AGAIN!” (Same with farmers)
Geminid
@rikyrah: The lies Noga Tarnopolsky complained of were Netanyahu saying loudspeakers would only broadcast from across the Israeli border. He was responding to complaints by a group of soldiers’ parents who worried that soldiers would be endangered by this stunt. But trucks with loudspeakers were in fact driven at least 5 kilometers into the Gaza Strip, despite risks from snipers and IEDs.
Barak Ravid reposted this from journalist Nadav Eyal:
Geminid
@Geminid: Barak Ravid also posted some reporting of his own:
This could be significant because Fidan* is a hard-headed realist who attended Trump’s UN Gaza summit Tuesday and talks at the White House yesterday. Also, the Turks talk to Hamas a lot.
Now, all eyes will be on Monday’s White House meeting between Trump and Netanyahu.
* I found Haken Fidan’s Wikipedia bbiography to be a good read. He’s an interesting man, and right now he seems to be President Erdogan’s likely successor. Fidan reaffirmedmight not be the only Foreign Minister with a PhD, but he’s probably the only one to serve 15 years as an army noncom.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Most vets I know (I am one) do not condone hate and power for power’s sake. Why? Because they saw a lot of that bullshit in the military. Some not as much as others but it was out there when I was in and I’d bet a lot that hasn’t changed much in the military. The military has to have power levels, because of what it does. But the people that abuse that power always stand out and not in a good way. The payback is often subtle but it is also often there. The vast majority, at least when I was in, understood the concept of the levels of power. Didn’t like it, mostly because of asshole pricks they had to deal with. But one did not have to be like that to get things that needed doing, done. People understood their jobs, they also understood pompous, arrogant, jackasses. You know, the people that NO ONE even considered to be actually human, and who failed time after time after time, at everything – because of their pompous arrogance. Respect is supposed to go both ways. Some people have ZERO concept of respect of others, and it ALWAYS shows.
rikyrah
Will someone from New Jersey tell me if the Democratic Candidate is spreading THE WORD on the airwaves her opponents illegal use of her MILITARY RECORD FILES.
rikyrah
KTLA
@KTLA
A 79-year-old Van Nuys car wash owner has filed a $50 million civil rights claim alleging that federal immigration agents used excessive force during a raid that left him with broken ribs, head trauma and other serious injuries, despite confirming he is a U.S. citizen. Full story: https://ktla.com/news/79-year-old-american-citizen-files-50-million-claim-after-car-wash-ice-raid/
Gretchen
@WaterGirl: That’s good! Was disappointed to have missed the zoom, especially after everyone started saying how nice it was.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: I don’t know if it’s on the airwaves, but i saw a clip of her being interviewed about it.
cwmoss
Is Act Blue the one where only like 1.5% of donations make it to candidates? If not, what is that org? It was in the news within the past couple months I’m very engaged but I don’t know the answer to that question.
Gretchen
The interesting thing about WinRed is that not only is it for-profit, but it’s required for Republican campaigns to use it, and Jared Kushner is involved somehow. So every single Republican candidate has to give a kickback to the Trump family.
AM in NC
I had a spare 45 minutes around lunchtime today, so I stood out on the highway in front of the Wegmans near me with my sign: ARE YOUR GROCERIES CHEAPER? / WE ARE ALL JIMMY KIMMEL
Lots of honks and thumbs up and shouts of solidarity and thanks.
One young white dude flipped me off, and I gave him a peace sign in return. One late middle-aged white woman (of which I am one) shook her head at my sign, and I pointed to each word of the “are your groceries cheaper” side of the sign and shook my head. And then one black woman in her 40s rolled down her window, told me she is paying less for groceries than she did under “President Auto Pen”, and when I said “well my bill has gone up by at least 25%”, she said “I hate liberal white women”. I said “I don’t hate you”, and smiled. Then she said “black people are moving in our direction and we are going to vote”, and I said “Great! I love when people vote”. All with a smile on my face and love in my heart. She was furious. I have to wonder where she gets her information about the world.
stinger
@WaterGirl: 🩷
I can but ask for more. More! More!
Baud
@rikyrah:
Reddit
WaterGirl
@cwmoss: That is definitely NOT ACT BLUE.
Professor Bigfoot
@rikyrah: But wait— I keep getting told that she lost because Black men abandoned her! You mean that motherfucker was lying?
See my shocked face.
RaflW
@Andrya: I guess it depends on one’s phone type or service provider. My G**gle Fi Pixel (android o.s.) does a remarkably good job of shunting about 97% of spam texts to a spam folder.
I check in about once a week when I feel feisty and want to spike my blood pressure (semi-kidding about the latter). If I get an earnest intro text from some Dem candidate, I just text STOP. More than half text back that I’m unsubscribed. If I don’t get that reply, then after a few mins I add them to “Spam & Block”.
If I get a text from a PAC, or, goddess help me, one purporting to be from Reanimated Skelator James Carville, then I kick into high gear. I text things, one word at a time, like James. Carville. Can. Fuck. ALL. The. Way. OFF. and a few more choice expletives. I often get a “you’ve been unsubscribed” once the F-bombs register with their AI reader.
As I understand it, but am not sure in all cases, campaigns pay their text provider for each and every text message sent or received. When I did texting for GOTV, it was a stupidly high cost per message. I hope to hell my return-spamming costs PACs and dumb Dems who think Carville is ‘relevant’ a noticeable sum.
And mostly, that I’ll get flagged in contact files as shitty and expensive and to be avoided.
(Yes, I’m retired. Why do you ask? haha)
RaflW
@cwmoss: There have been several articles or skeet threads in recent months about a whole farm of suspect PACs that raise a lot of small-dollar money from repeat donors with aggressive messaging, bogus “400% matching” and crap like that.
And when the FEC filings are looked at later by reporters or researchers, the scam PACs consume almost all the fund through consulting fees and ancillary services (ie: the text banking is for-profit and owned by the people who organized the PAC). Candidates or the Party get some minuscule percent of the funds.
What platform the use to process the CC charges I do not know, but ActBlue is a processor, not a sender of spammy, scammy messages.
Andrya
@RaflW: Thanks for the info. I have (prepare to be shocked!) two old fashioned flip phones and that may make defensive measures less effective. And I find Carville unbearably annoying, and profoundly wrong, too- though I haven’t replied tell him to f*ck off. (I may do that now that you have suggested it, though…)
cwmoss
@RaflW: thanks. That’s helpful info
Glidwrith
@cwmoss: No, ActBlue is clean. I think the bad one is Mothership, has a ton of shell corporations. As always, if you want to donate to a candidate, go directly to the candidate.
WaterGirl
@Glidwrith:
Unless it’s one of our BJ candidates where they have agreed to spend our dollars only on organizing and GOTV! :-)