Photo: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Mid–Wednesday afternoon, one of my Democratic campaign sources nervously texted me, “Are you hearing stuff on this ActBlue EO? Campaigns are freaking out.”
Democrats were experiencing a rising panic as rumors swirled that President Donald Trump would sign an executive order targeting ActBlue, the party’s wildly successful online fundraising platform that has allowed Democrats to out-raise Republicans in small-dollar donations. So far this year, it has raised over $400 million. Multiple campaign officials have told me that the major Democratic committees for the Senate and the House, as well as powerful outside groups like EMILY’s List, were reaching out to campaigns to let them know the executive order was coming. “Anyone who’s working with a decent fundraising firm is preparing for this,” one veteran campaign manager told me.
On Thursday evening, Trump signed an order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate ActBlue, a remarkable attack on the infrastructure of the Democratic Party and part of a series of nearly daily acts of persecution by the administration against political opponents. Trump’s memorandum claims congressional investigators “revealed significant fraud schemes” involving foreign campaign contributions, which are illegal under U.S. law. ActBlue has denied such allegations.
“They do want to go after what they see as a real advantage for Democrats in a platform that empowers millions of real people to be part of the Democratic process,” says a top Democratic digital strategist who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns. He added that this was a threat from Trump that is “brazen and political and corrupt, in my view.” As one Democratic ad-maker and former campaign manager says, it’s about ending the historic advantage ActBlue has had over other fundraising platforms. “We have more small-dollar donors than they do,” they say.
It’s not clear what Trump’s order would do to ActBlue exactly, but nobody thinks it wouldn’t be a blow for Democrats because it’s the key link in the party’s fundraising apparatus, letting donors contribute with just one click. “It’ll hurt us in the short run,” one southern Democratic consultant explains, because ActBlue makes it so easy to donate with one click. “That will be hard to lose. And that will take years to rebuild and will cost us some money.”
Republicans had already been looking for a new and creative way to strangle the nonprofit political action committee. In April, the chairs of three oversight and investigative congressional committees in Congress wrote to ActBlue’s CEO informing her of their concern about the platform’s “fraud prevention policies and practices” that Trump referenced. Since then, Democratic campaign officials have felt a hyperawareness that the Trump administration would find a creative way to limit ActBlue, though not its Republican counterpart, WinRed.
Late Wednesday night, Regina Wallace-Jones, ActBlue’s CEO and president, sent an email out to campaigns and strategists to reassure them that the platform’s “team sprung into action and made every preparation from a legal and communications perspective.”
Though Trump and Republicans say they’re fighting fraud, Democrats believe the move is nakedly political. “This memorandum amounts to a bill of attainder. It is unconstitutional, corrupt, and un-American,” says Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist and lawyer. “So, par for the course under the Trump regime.”
Even if ActBlue were somehow muzzled, Democratic fundraising would not stop altogether. Campaign operatives mentioned other fundraising tools and platforms, such as NGP Van and GiveGreen.
In the short term, Democrats expected Trump’s attack on ActBlue would be a boon. Tim Tagaris, a digital strategist, predicted on X that the move would “unleash a torrent of short-term fundraising and long-term innovation that Republicans will come to regret.”
