The Despicable Way Republicans Are Scamming Old People
Some of the country’s largest grassroots political donors are handing their money over to Republicans—but they don’t seem to be aware of it.
Hundreds of elderly dementia patients are fueling America’s campaign finance system, collectively shelling out millions of dollars to political candidates while they themselves struggle for cash, according to a CNN investigation published Tuesday.
Some patients, lured by the deceptively direct and aggressive automated messaging strategies utilized by political campaigns, felt that they were taking part in a network of political operatives and had a direct line to either Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.
“President Trump NEVER does this! He personally tapped YOU to become a MAGA Living Legend!” read one message from the Trump campaign.
“The blunt truth: Kamala is BEHIND, and she’s COUNTING on us!” read a note from Harris’s team.
That presumed and false connection drove the dementia patients to tap into retirement savings in order to contribute six-figure sums to the candidate of their choice, CNN reported. Some even threw themselves into debt over the course of thousands of transactions to politicians they believed they were communicating with directly.
One Baltimore-area victim, an 83-year-old woman whom CNN described as wearing “pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones,” didn’t know she had given Republicans more than $350,000 since 2020.
An 80-year-old communications engineer from Texas was another dementia patient who fell prey to the deception. In September 2022, the unnamed man donated $250 to Ron Johnson’s campaign for Senate over the platform WinRed. But as he was barraged with messages over the next year and a half, the Lone Star senior—who for years had thrifted his clothes and driven an old car in order to save for his retirement—unknowingly made more than 15,000 transactions, amounting to more than $440,000 in donations.
CNN noted that the man’s son had spent weeks trying to “help him get the money back” from WinRed but was only able to secure refunds for a third of his father’s political contributions.
Data from the Federal Trade Commission revealed that WinRed had nearly seven times as many FTC complaints as its Democratic competitor, ActBlue. Trump was the single largest beneficiary of the donations.
The majority of victims identified by CNN were in their eighties and nineties and included veterans, house cleaners, nursing home residents, and widows living alone. Some of the donors had coughed up more cash to politicians than they had paid for their homes.