I just received a solicitation from yet another organization, “United Forward PAC,” purporting to be a PAC working to elect Democrats up and down the ballot:
Let’s talk about all the reasons why this is suspicious:
- Why do we suddenly need a new PAC working to elect Democrats less than three months before the November elections? How does it possibly make sense to spin up an entirely new organization from scratch this close to the election, rather than leveraging one of the many PACs that already exist for this purpose and are fully spun-up and actively working?
- Why doesn’t this solicitation say anything about which candidates it is supporting or which races it is involving itself with?
- Who is “John Todd” and why is he qualified to lead a PAC? Who else is involved with running this PAC?
- Why doesn’t their web site work?
- Why don’t their job postings answer any of these questions?
- Why did they file twice with the FEC, once as “United Forward” and once as “United Forward PAC“?
- Why is their official mailing address a WeWork?
- Why did they send me (and, presumably, many others) unsolicited email without telling us where they got our email addresses from, in violation of the terms of use of Sendgrid, the service they sent the email through?
- Why don’t they have any presence on Twitter?
In short, I don’t know who these people are, but I think it’s unlikely they’re up to anything good, and even if they are, there are many other, more established PACs you’re better off supporting.
P.S. If you got a solicitation from this PAC, please forward a copy of it as an attachment to abuse@sendgrid.com and let them know that you did not sign up for emails from this sender and they’re therefore in violation of Sendgrid’s terms of use. Even if they are a legit PAC, they deserve to get kicked off of Sendgrid for spamming, and the more people report them, the more likely that is.
(Cross-posted at Daily Kos.)
