Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), both of whom have established themselves as firmly committed to far-right extremism, raised huge sums of cash in the first three months of 2021 — and, as outlined in a new report from ProPublica, each spent well over half a million dollars on “list rental” during that same period. That expense entails renting contact lists from other groups in order to solicit already established supporters for money. Thus, ProPublica notes, “their headline-grabbing numbers were more the product of expensively soliciting hardcore Republicans than an organic groundswell of far-reaching support.”
Both Greene and Hawley reported first-quarter fundraising totals at over $3 million. Wes Anderson, a pollster who works for Hawley, insisted that the high total makes “crystal clear that a strong majority of Missouri voters and donors stand firmly with Senator Hawley, in spite of the continued false attacks coming from the radical left” — but many of the people on the rented lists who contributed to Hawley’s campaign might not have even been residents of Missouri. Sure, Trumpism has millions of supporters across the country — but millions more voted for Biden in the 2020 election. The idea of an overwhelmingly high level of support for Hawley’s brand of far-right extremism isn’t accurately representative of reality.
In the first quarter of 2021, Hawley and Greene both spent almost $600,000 on list rental, which is a staggering spending level. In the period under consideration, list rental was the top expense for both of the politicians’ campaign committees. Notably, LGM Consulting Group — which was the top list provider for both Hawley and Greene across early 2021 — takes as much as 80 percent from donations submitted through the emails that it helps facilitate.
This situation isn’t the first occasion when Republican fundraising practices have come under scrutiny. During the 2020 election cycle, the Trump campaign put pre-checked boxes on its fundraising forms that set up recurring donations unless un-checked by the user. By October, these boxes had eight to nine lines of text before getting to the notice of what the box would actually do, and in that version of the materials, the campaign messaging was in bold and the explanation that the box would set up additional donations was not. Following a surge of fraud claims over unexpected continuing charges from the Trump campaign, the ex-president’s team refunded tens of millions of dollars to supporters.
Meanwhile, neither Hawley nor Greene have acknowledged the problems inherent in their refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election as legitimate. Even after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, Hawley and Greene voted against the certification of results from the election. No court anywhere in the country ever even partially accepted the idea that fraud was in any way responsible for Biden’s victory. Hawley’s smug insistence that there’s anything like an open question surrounding the security of the election is totally deceptive.
