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      G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse’

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      The Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the inquiry into the deadly riot at the Capitol.WASHINGTON — The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”After the vote, party leaders rushed to clarify that language, saying it was never meant to apply to rioters who violently stormed the Capitol in Mr. Trump’s name.“Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line,” Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, said in a statement. “They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”But the censure, which was carefully negotiated in private among party members, made no such distinction, nor is the House committee investigating the attack examining any normal political debate. It was the latest and most forceful effort by the Republican Party to minimize what happened and the broader attempt by Mr. Trump and his allies to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. In approving it and opting to punish two of its own, Republicans seemed to embrace a position that many of them have only hinted at: that the assault and the actions that preceded it were acceptable.It came days after Mr. Trump suggested that, if re-elected in 2024, he would consider pardons for those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack and for the first time described his goal that day as subverting the election results, saying in a statement that Vice President Mike Pence “could have overturned the election.”On Friday, Mr. Pence pushed back on Mr. Trump, calling his assertion “wrong.”“I had no right to overturn the election,” Mr. Pence told the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, at a gathering in Florida.Read the full resolutionThe Republican National Committee’s resolution censures Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.Read Document 2 pagesThe day’s events, which were supposed to be about unity, only served to highlight Republicans’ persistent division over Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as their leaders try to move forward and focus attention on what they call the failings of the Biden administration. More than a year later, the party is still wrestling with how much criticism and dissent it will tolerate.“Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, wrote on Twitter “Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost.”He did not mention that the party chairwoman who presided over the meeting and orchestrated the censure resolution, Ms. McDaniel, is his niece.The censure was also condemned by Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who, like Mr. Romney, voted to remove Mr. Trump from office for inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, and Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, also a Republican, who called Friday “a sad day for my party — and the country.”Republican National Committee members defended the measure, describing people who have been questioned by the Jan. 6 committee as victims in a broader Democratic effort to keep focus on the attack at the Capitol.“The nominal Republicans on the committee provide a pastiche of bipartisanship, but no genuine protection or due process for the ordinary people who did not riot being targeted and terrorized by the committee,” said Richard Porter, a Republican National Committee member from Illinois. “The investigation is a de facto Democrat-only investigation increasingly unmoored from congressional norms.”The Jan. 6 committee, which has seven Democratic members, has interviewed more than 475 witnesses, the vast majority of whom either volunteered to testify or agreed to without a subpoena. It has no prosecutorial powers, and is charged with drawing up a report and producing recommendations to prevent anything similar from happening again.The party’s far-right flank has long agitated to boot Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger out of the House Republican Conference for agreeing to serve on the panel, a push that Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, has tried to brush aside. And the formal censure, approved by the state party chairs and committee members who make up the Republican National Committee, is sure to stir up those efforts again.The Republican Party declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it as “legitimate political discourse.”Jason Andrew for The New York Times“We need to move on from that whole discussion and, frankly, move forward and get the House back in 2022,” said Representative Mike Garcia, a California Republican facing a difficult re-election campaign in a newly configured district.Most House Republicans tried to ignore the actions of the party on Friday, refusing to answer questions or saying they had not read the censure resolution. Representative Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas, called it “dumb stuff,” while Representative Mark Green, Republican of Tennessee, lamented the distraction from “this abysmal administration’s record.”Democrats, however, were incensed at the resolution’s language.“The Republican Party is so off the deep end now that they are describing an attempted coup and a deadly insurrection as political expression,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the special House committee investigating the Capitol attack. “It is a scandal that historians will be aghast at, to think that a major political party would be denouncing Liz Cheney for standing up for the Constitution and not saying anything about Donald Trump’s involvement in the insurrection.”In his own defense, Mr. Kinzinger said: “I have no regrets about my decision to uphold my oath of office and defend the Constitution. I will continue to focus my efforts on standing for truth and working to fight the political matrix that’s led us to where we find ourselves today.”The resolution spoke repeatedly of party unity as the goal of censuring the lawmakers, saying that Republicans’ ability to focus on the Biden administration was being “sabotaged” by the “actions and words” of Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger, which indicate “they support Democrat efforts to destroy President Trump more than they support winning back a Republican majority in 2022.”Normally, the party stays out of primary fights, but the resolution will make it easier for the Republican apparatus to abandon Ms. Cheney and throw its weight and money behind her main G.O.P. challenger, Harriet Hageman.It declares that the party “shall immediately cease any and all support of” both lawmakers “as members of the Republican Party for their behavior, which has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic, and is inconsistent with the position of the conference.”Mr. Kinzinger has already announced he will not seek re-election, as have some other House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the attack on the Capitol. Ms. Cheney, however, has vowed to stand for re-election.Representative Adam Kinzinger has announced that he will not seek re-election, as have some other House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesEarlier this week, the Wyoming delegation to the Republican National Committee submitted a so-called “Rule 11” letter, formalizing party support for Ms. Hageman. The existence of the letter was reported by The Washington Post.The letter allows the Republican National Committee to send resources to the Wyoming branch of the party to spend on Ms. Hageman’s behalf — essentially designating her as the party’s presumptive nominee. The designations are common in Republican politics, but typically are used to support incumbents who may be facing token primary challengers. Ms. Cheney, who faces an uphill battle in her re-election bid against a Republican Party aligned with Mr. Trump, said party leaders “have made themselves willing hostages” to Mr. Trump.“I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump,” she said. “History will be their judge. I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what.”Ms. Cheney has a commanding financial advantage over Ms. Hageman, according to federal campaign finance reports released this week. Ms. Cheney entered 2022 with nearly $5 million in campaign cash, while Ms. Hageman reported just $380,000.The censure resolution was watered down from an initial version that called directly for the House Republican Conference to “expel” Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger “without delay.” That demand was dropped. However, the language condemning the attack on “legitimate political discourse” was then added.William J. Palatucci, a Republican National Committee member from New Jersey who said he opposed the resolution, said those changes were made “behind closed doors.” The final language was officially circulated to committee members early Friday morning. He called it “cancel culture at its worst.”Luke Broadwater More

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      RNC Signals a Pullout From Presidential Debates

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      The Republican National Committee says it will require candidates to pledge to not participate in debates run by the Commission on Presidential Debates. What would replace them, if anything, was unclear.The Republican National Committee is preparing to change its rules to require presidential candidates seeking the party’s nomination to sign a pledge to not participate in any debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.Republican committee officials alerted the debate commission to their plans in a letter sent on Thursday, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. If the change goes forward, it would be one of the most substantial shifts in how presidential and vice-presidential debates have been conducted since the commission began organizing debates more than 30 years ago.The nonprofit commission, founded by the two parties in 1987 to codify the debates as a permanent part of presidential elections, describes itself as nonpartisan. But Republicans have complained for nearly a decade that its processes favor the Democrats, mirroring increasing rancor from conservatives toward Washington-based institutions.The move by the R.N.C. was an outgrowth of those long-held complaints and came after months of discussions between the commission and party officials. According to the R.N.C.’s letter, the chairman of the party’s temporary presidential debate committee, David Bossie, began discussions last year with the debate commission’s co-chairman, Frank Fahrenkopf, a former Republican official.The Republican Party chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, had demanded that changes be made to the commission and how the debates were held, writing in a letter to the commission in June that the party and its voters had lost faith in the commission.The change requiring candidates to refuse participation in the commission’s debates is to be voted on at the R.N.C. winter meeting in Salt Lake City in February. If the R.N.C. moves forward with it, it is unclear what that would mean for future debates. But it would change the approach to be similar to what happened before the commission existed, when the two parties or campaigns had to negotiate directly and agree on terms, or no debates would take place.Commission officials have privately complained that R.N.C. leaders have conflated the processes around primary debates with those in the general election, which are the only ones the commission is involved with. They have also complained that the commission historically deals with campaigns and not with party committees. While the eventual nominee could decide to debate, there’s far more energy in the G.O.P. base behind abandoning institutions than there used to be.Circumstances could always change and the R.N.C. could choose not to go ahead with the planned rules change. But Ms. McDaniel has walked far out on a limb with her latest letter, and the commission, which usually negotiates with the nominees’ campaigns, is showing no sign of making the R.N.C. a negotiating partner.“The C.P.D. deals directly with candidates for President and Vice President who qualify for participation,” the commission said in a statement. “The C.P.D.’s plans for 2024 will be based on fairness, neutrality and a firm commitment to help the American public learn about the candidates and the issues.”One major concern for the R.N.C. was the timing of the first debate in the 2024 election cycle.In 2020, more than one million ballots were cast before the first presidential debate on Sept. 29 that year, after some states changed their election rules because of the coronavirus pandemic and expanded both absentee and early voting. The party has been pushing the commission to host a debate before early voting begins in 2024.Former President Donald J. Trump has criticized the commission since his first campaign, against Hillary Clinton in 2016, when he complained that one of its co-chairs, Mike McCurry, was a White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. He also complained then that the debates were being held at the same time as N.F.L. games. Mr. McCurry later condemned Mr. Trump’s attacks on the media as president.Officials with the commission told the R.N.C. in December that one of the party’s demands in particular was unacceptable: having nonvoting representatives of either the R.N.C. or the Democratic National Committee at the commission’s board meetings. The commission wrote that it was still studying that and other concerns the R.N.C. had raised, including the choice of moderators, as part of its review before the 2024 campaign cycle.“We take the R.N.C.’s observations and suggestions seriously and, as we have said previously, we will give them careful consideration,” the commission’s letter read. “In furtherance of our position as a nonpartisan, neutral body, which neither favors nor disfavors any party or candidate, we do not negotiate the terms or conditions of our operations with anyone.”But in her letter on Thursday, Ms. McDaniel replied that the commission’s response seemed designed to “delay any reform until it is too late to matter for the 2024 election.”She added that the Republican National Committee’s duty was to ensure that its candidates debated their opponents on a level playing field.“So long as the C.P.D. appears intent on stonewalling the meaningful reforms necessary to restore its credibility with the Republican Party as a fair and nonpartisan actor, the R.N.C. will take every step to ensure that future Republican presidential nominees are given that opportunity elsewhere,” Ms. McDaniel wrote.Accordingly, she added, the R.N.C. would start the process of amending its rules at the winter meeting “to prohibit future Republican nominees from participating in C.P.D.-sponsored debates.”It remains to be seen what, if any, new entity the Republican Party will choose as a host for debates and whether Democrats will agree.Republicans have long complained about how the commission handles debates, going back to the 2012 campaign, when Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was the Republican nominee against the incumbent Democrat, President Barack Obama. The moderator of the town hall-style debate, Candy Crowley, then with CNN, fact checked Mr. Romney in real time about a claim he made about Mr. Obama, prompting an outcry from conservatives.But the intensity of frustration with the commission has increased since Mr. Trump first became the Republican nominee in 2016.Mr. Trump’s adviser, Rudolph W. Giuliani, argued with the commission at the second debate with Mrs. Clinton, when he tried to seat women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct near the stage. Mr. Trump has also complained about moderators repeatedly, insisting that both the former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and the NBC News reporter Kristen Welker were biased against him (Mr. Trump said after the debate that Ms. Welker had been fair).Mr. Trump announced three days after the first presidential debate in 2020 that he had been infected with the coronavirus. He had appeared sick to some onlookers at the first debate, and his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, wrote in a book about the presidency that Mr. Trump had in fact had one positive coronavirus test in the days before the debate, followed by a negative one.The commission changed the second presidential debate to a virtual format, prompting Mr. Trump to withdraw from it after a contentious debate with the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, for which Mr. Trump was heavily criticized.Mr. Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Bill Stepien, wrote a blistering letter to the commission after the second debate format was changed, accusing the commission, among other things, of omitting the topic of foreign policy to try to help Mr. Biden.Mr. Romney, who is Ms. McDaniel’s uncle, said that it would be “nuts” to go ahead with withdrawing from the commission debates. “The American people want to hear from the nominees of the two respective parties,” he told HuffPost. “It’s a good chance to understand their views and to see them in a high-pressure situation. It’s a great service to the public.” More

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      Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers' Dominion Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows

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      Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.Read the Trump campaign’s internal memoLast November, communications staff members on the Trump campaign hastily assembled a memo examining outlandish election claims. The memo found that many of the allegations were baseless.Read DocumentEven at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Mr. Coomer, “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee, was accused of playing a role in a conspiracy to breach voting machines and reverse the 2020 election’s outcome. Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Associated PressMr. Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell, Mr. Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company’s systems to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.Soon after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were part of a self-described “elite strike force” of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.On Nov. 19, for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters and placed Mr. Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion’s voting machines. By Ms. Powell’s account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a “massive influence of communist money.”Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking comment.Mr. Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially true.”And as recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was “essentially a bloodless coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single shot being fired.”It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the court documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.“They wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money,” Mr. Giuliani was quoted as saying in the deposition.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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      Trump Wants Your Money. Again.

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      Donald Trump just can’t stop writing me.“Friend, Did you see my email from a few days ago?” he asked on Tuesday. It was, I believe, the sixth message I’d gotten from him since Labor Day — a.k.a. Monday. All addressed to “Friend.” Now, if Trump was really your friend, don’t you think he’d call you by your … name?Anyhow, all of these letters involve fund-raising. And great deals! Contribute any amount to Trump’s joint fund-raising committee, Save America, and “your gift will be INCREASED by 500%.”Extremely unclear where that extra cash will be coming from. Maybe a rich person who agrees to match donations, the way some do during the very, very, very much more modest fund-raising drives for places like public radio stations? Maybe a miraculous money tree?“We have a CRITICAL End-of-Month fundraising deadline coming up, and each day when I ask my team who has stepped up, they NEVER mention YOUR NAME. Why is that, Friend?” the wounded former president demanded.Once again we will note that it’d be pretty strange for your name to come up when nobody seems to really know what it is. I like to picture someone in a meeting asking, “Hey, what about Friend?”To be fair, Trump is almost an internet monk now, compared with the way he communicated during his last presidential campaign. In the months before the 2020 election, his supporters were reportedly getting an average of about 14 emails a day from his organization.Trump hasn’t said whether he’ll be running again in 2024. He’s plenty busy with other stuff, like holding rallies, playing golf and spending the anniversary of 9/11 providing commentary for a boxing match at a Florida casino.And he’s hardly the only major political name out beating the bushes for donations. Nancy Pelosi was in my inbox Wednesday with a letter decrying the new Texas anti-abortion law and with a petition at the very end of which we learn that Nancy “needs $981 more in the door before midnight to hit her goal.”Kind of hard to believe she couldn’t just pick up the phone and nail down that $981. But on the plus side, Pelosi indicated she’d be very happy with just $20. And she did get in my actual first name.Pelosi’s correspondence isn’t nearly as … energetic as you-know-who’s. “Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY and your gift will be INCREASED by 500%,” writes “Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States.” Just in case you’d forgotten.Any amount? Sextupled by magic? “There’s no way to know what they mean by that,” said Robert Kelner, a Washington lawyer who’s an expert in campaign finance issues.Well, it’s certainly impressive how urgent Trump makes it all sound. During the Labor Day barrage he announced that “your 400% impact offer has been extended” and that if you just “CONTRIBUTE NOW,” a $250 contribution will count as … $1,250!If you’re interested, please make sure it happens only once. As Shane Goldmacher reported in The Times this spring, a 63-year-old cancer patient in hospice donated what was just about his last $500, and then discovered $3,000 had been withdrawn by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days, leaving his account empty and frozen. The campaign, you see, had set up a default system that siphoned new money every week from donors who didn’t realize they had to make a special effort to opt out.Very tricky business, that. Another Trump letter includes boxes — prechecked for your convenience — with rousing statements like: “President Trump, I need you right now. This is where we step up and show the left-wing MOB that REAL Americans are REJECTING JOE BIDEN’S corrupt agenda.” Said box quietly ends, “Make this a monthly recurring donation.”Campaign finance is, by any measure, a wicked complicated matter. Mistakes do happen. In the last two and a half months of 2020, the Biden campaign made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million. Which sounds like a hell of a lot until you consider that for the same period, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee had to issue more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million.Many of the Trump emails suggest he needs money to challenge those evil, wrongheaded, “Biden won!” election results. Doesn’t seem like all that great a legal investment. Although probably better than those lawsuits Rudy Giuliani announced in a parking lot next to a porn store in Philadelphia.Some of the money that goes to Trump’s PAC is used to underwrite his travel around the country and — if he happened to be in the mood — could be used to pay salaries for his family members or pricey events at, say, a Trump hotel.No small matter, that. Think about Trump Tower. On the one hand, it’s in even worse shape than most Manhattan real estate, carrying a name not all that useful as a New York brand. On the other, his PAC has reportedly been shelling out more than $37,000 a month for office space in Trump Tower. Not at all clear what said space is needed for, politics-wise, but if Trump ever decides to reboot “The Apprentice” with a pandemic flair, he’s got the set ready.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump’s Repeating Donation Tactics Led to Millions in Refunds Into 2021

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      Donald Trump and the Republican Party returned $12.8 million to donors in the first half of the year, a sign that their aggressive fund-raising tactics ensnared many unwitting contributors.The aggressive fund-raising tactics that former President Donald J. Trump deployed late in last year’s presidential campaign have continued to spur an avalanche of refunds into 2021, with Mr. Trump, the Republican Party and their shared accounts returning $12.8 million to donors in the first six months of the year, newly released federal records show.The refunds were some of the biggest outlays that Mr. Trump made in 2021 as he has built up his $102 million political war chest — and amounted to roughly 20 percent of the $56 million he and his committees raised online so far this year.Trailing in the polls and facing a cash crunch last September, Mr. Trump’s political operation began opting online donors into automatic recurring contributions by prechecking a box on its digital donation forms to take a withdrawal every week. Donors would have to notice the box and uncheck it to opt out of the donation. A second prechecked box took out another donation, known as a “money bomb.”The Trump team then obscured that fact by burying the fine print beneath multiple lines of bold and capitalized text, a New York Times investigation earlier this year found.The maneuver spiked revenues in the short term — allowing Mr. Trump to spend money before the election — and then caused a cascade of fraud complaints to credit cards and demands for refunds from supporters. The refunded donations amounted to an unwitting interest-free loan from Mr. Trump’s supporters in the weeks when he most needed it.New Federal Election Commission records from WinRed, the Republican donation-processing site, show the full scale of the financial impact. All told, more than $135 million was refunded to donors by Mr. Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts in the 2020 cycle through June 2021 — including roughly $60 million after Election Day.“It’s pretty clear that the Trump campaign was engaging in deceptive tactics,” said Peter Loge, the director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University. “If you have to return that much money you are doing something either very wrong or very unethical.”The Trump campaign has previously defended its online practices, with Jason Miller, a spokesman, saying that only 0.87 percent of transactions were subjected to formal credit card disputes last year, which would be about 200,000 transactions. Mr. Miller did not respond to questions this week about the Trump refunds.An example of the prechecked recurring donation boxes Mr. Trump used in 2020.Of the refunds issued this year, $8.1 million came from Mr. Trump’s shared account with the R.N.C., the records show. An additional $2.2 million came from his re-election committee and $2.5 million was issued by the party itself. The party stopped operating in tandem with Mr. Trump earlier this year but still owed refunds from 2020; most of its returned donations came in January and February.The Times investigation had previously found that the Trump operation along with the party had refunded more than 10 percent of the $1.2 billion it had raised online through the end of 2020. President Biden’s equivalent committees refunded 2.2 percent of what had been raised online last year on ActBlue, the Democratic donation-processing site, records show.The Federal Election Commission has since unanimously recommended that Congress prohibit campaigns from prechecking boxes for recurring donations, and legislation to do so has been introduced in both the House and Senate. The state attorneys general in New York, Connecticut, Minnesota and Maryland have also opened investigations into WinRed and ActBlue’s practices.WinRed has sued in federal court to stop the investigation by saying that federal law pre-empts any state investigation. Last week, the attorneys general sought to dismiss the WinRed suit, arguing in a court filing that consumer-protection laws gave them jurisdiction.The prechecked recurring box has become increasingly widespread among Republicans using WinRed, including burying the disclosure under extraneous text; Democrats have moved to stop using such boxes entirely.The two Republican senators who lost the January runoffs in Georgia, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, used prechecked boxes to lead donors into weekly withdrawals, resulting in a rash of refunds. Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue combined to refund $10.4 million from Nov. 24 through the end of June 2021 — out of a total of $68.5 million raised online during that time.The Democrats who defeated them, Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, raised tens of millions of dollars more online — and refunded less than one-fifth as much, around $2 million, during the same period.Overall, WinRed issued refunds that totaled 12.7 percent of what it raised the first six months of the year; ActBlue’s refunds were 3.3 percent of what it collected.The disparity was even more stark in January of this year, when refunds were surging for Mr. Trump and Georgia Senate Republicans. That month, refunds issued by WinRed equaled nearly 28 percent of what the platform collected in contributions, records show. There was even one day when WinRed issued more in refunds than it reported receiving in contributions.WinRed said there was simply a greater volume of refunds immediately after elections, and noted that refunds had slowed in recent months. In the first quarter of 2021, records show that refunds issued on WinRed equaled nearly 20 percent of what was raised; that figured dipped to 5.7 percent in the second quarter.Mr. Trump’s new political action committee, Save America, continues to precheck its “money bomb” and recurring donation box, taking out fresh donations monthly. In addition to the $12.8 million refunded by Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and party committees tied to it, his new PAC issued nearly $800,000 in refunds in the first six months of the year, 3.75 percent of what it raised.ActBlue, which previously allowed campaigns wide latitude to opt donors into repeating contributions, has clamped down on the tactic. In July, the site implemented new rules essentially forbidding political candidates and groups from prechecking a recurring box unless the link to the donation page explicitly says there will be repeating withdrawals.Digital experts said that many donors do not notice the extra contributions for many months, if at all. Some decide pursuing refunds is too onerous or complex. Older contributors are seen as especially vulnerable to such aggressive digital tactics, campaign strategists say.For Republicans, prechecking is something some strategists defend as a useful tool to shrink the traditional Democratic advantage of online fund-raising.The three main Republican Party committees — one devoted to the House, one to the Senate and the R.N.C. — nearly matched the parallel Democratic groups in online fund-raising, collecting $68.8 million compared with $70.8 million for the Democrats in the first six months of 2021.At the same time, those Republican Party groups issued more than $5 million in additional WinRed refunds compared with the Democratic groups — 11.2 percent of what they raised online compared with 3.7 percent, records show.Rachel Shorey More

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      How Republicans Still Rely on the Trump Brand to Fund-Raise

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      Trump pint glasses. Trump T-shirts. Trump memberships. Six months after the former president left office, his party’s fund-raising success depends heavily on his vaunted name.Even in defeat, nothing sells in the Republican Party quite like Donald J. Trump.The Republican National Committee has been dangling a “Trump Life Membership” to entice small contributors to give online. The party’s Senate campaign arm has been hawking an “Official Trump Majority Membership.” And the committee devoted to winning back the House has been touting Mr. Trump’s nearly every public utterance, talking up a nonexistent Trump social media network and urging donations to “retake Trump’s Majority.”Six months after Mr. Trump left office, the key to online fund-raising success for the Republican Party in 2021 can largely be summed up in the three words it used to identify the sender of a recent email solicitation: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”The fund-raising language of party committees is among the most finely tuned messaging in politics, with every word designed to motivate more people to give more money online. And all that testing has yielded Trump-themed gimmicks and giveaways including Trump pint glasses, Trump-signed pictures, Trump event tickets and Trump T-shirts — just from the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the month of July.“The Republican Party has never had small-dollar fund-raising at this scale before Donald Trump,” said Brad Parscale, who was Mr. Trump’s first campaign manager in 2020 and is still an adviser, “and they probably never will at this scale after Donald Trump.”The strategy is clearly paying financial dividends, as three main G.O.P. federal committees raised a combined $134.8 million from direct individual contributions in the first six months of 2021, nearly matching the $136.2 million raised by the equivalent Democratic committees, federal records show.But the endless invocations of the former president underscore not only his enduring appeal to online Republican activists and donors — the base of the party’s base and its financial engine — but also the unlikelihood that the G.O.P. apparatus wants to, or even can, meaningfully break from him for the foreseeable future.The stark reliance on Mr. Trump’s name to spur small donations amounts to a tangible expression of the party’s inescapable dependency on him — one that risks preventing a reckoning over the losses the G.O.P. suffered in the last four years, including Mr. Trump’s own, which he has denied by clinging to false theories of election fraud.In July, the Trump-themed gimmicks and giveaways included pint glasses, signed pictures, event tickets and T-shirts.National Republican Senatorial CommitteeRepublican strategists said the party’s messaging and the influx of money reflect Mr. Trump’s continued hold on the hearts and wallets of the grass-roots, despite the party losing the House, the Senate and the White House in his single term.“The governing class of the Republican Party would just as well see him move on,” said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist and former top political adviser for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It’s been ‘enough is enough.’ But he still keeps a firm grip on the grass-roots.”With Democrats in full control of Washington, some Republicans are hoping their party can rally chiefly against President Biden and the Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Yet Mr. Biden’s name has been as absent from the G.O.P. pleas for cash as Mr. Trump has been pervasive, a warning sign that Republicans are struggling to stir the kind of impassioned opposition to him that they had once generated to former President Barack Obama, and that Democrats had uniting their party against Mr. Trump four years ago.Since May 1, the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has invoked Mr. Biden’s name in the sender line on its emails just four times; Mr. Trump’s name has appeared there 185 times.The Republican National Committee treated Mr. Trump’s June 14 birthday almost like a national holiday, sending out no less than 19 emails about it, starting more than five weeks in advance. The House campaign arm joined in, too: “Why haven’t you signed Trump’s Bday Card?!” read one text message. “We’ve texted 6x & it’s only 5 days away!”The heavy use of Mr. Trump’s name has at times been a source of friction with the former president, who has begun ramping up fund-raising for his own political action committee, called Save America. As a businessman, Mr. Trump spent years leveraging and licensing his name for cash, slapping it on buildings and products, and he and some of his advisers have been irked by the exploitation of his image by party committees that do not always align with his political interests.In March, his lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to the three main Republican committees demanding they stop using his name and likeness. But back-channel discussions defused the situation as party officials insisted they had every right to refer to him but promised not to use his signature without permission. Still, some party committees continue to push the limits by wording messages to appear as though they are coming from Mr. Trump.Current and past party operatives said Mr. Trump’s name simply raises the most money. Every click and contribution is carefully cataloged, and committees can compare how much is raised using different messages and messengers. Those with Mr. Trump’s name simply outperform, operatives said.“President Trump and his policies remain a major driver for small-dollar donors,” said Michael McAdams, communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee.During one stretch in June, roughly 90 percent of that committee’s fund-raising texts mentioned Mr. Trump. Some solicitations have appealed to supporters’ love of Mr. Trump; others have tapped into their fear of disappointing him.At one point this spring, the committee warned donors against opting out of recurring monthly contributions through a prechecked box: “If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR.”Fund-raising text messages from the National Republican Congressional CommitteeIn a late 2020 memo, WinRed, the party’s main online donation-processing platform, said that donation pages that mentioned the word “Trump” reaped, on average, twice as many donors as pages that did not. WinRed still gives Mr. Trump top billing on its home page, featuring him above the actual party committees. Mr. Trump also continues to be featured prominently in many Democratic fund-raising pitches.While former presidents do typically maintain a following among the grass-roots — Mr. Obama is still featured on the donation pages of some Democratic Party groups — Mr. Trump is uniquely omnipresent in the Republican digital ecosystem.Tim Cameron, a Republican digital strategist, said one reason is that much of the Republican online donating infrastructure sprang up during the Trump era — after years of neglect and being outraised by the Democrats. “It’s how these lists were built,” he said.Hogan Gidley, who worked as an adviser to Mr. Trump at the White House, said the party — which still is populated by vestiges of a Trump-skeptical establishment that sees his incendiary approach to politics as a poor fit for swing districts and states — risks backlash and anger if it uses the Trump brand to bankroll causes and candidates not aligned with the pro-Trump movement.“This is where the party is,” Mr. Gidley said. “You can ride that wave or you can try to swim against it but the wave is going to win.”Mr. Trump and the party are sometimes directly at odds.The party’s Senate campaign arm, for instance, is supporting the re-election of Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who voted to convict Mr. Trump of impeachable offenses. Mr. Trump is supporting her challenger, Kelly Tshibaka. Mr. Trump has also regularly attacked Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, including in a speech to party donors this spring, calling him a “stone cold loser.”Mr. McConnell has ignored the slights. The online store of the party committee charged with returning Mr. McConnell to the majority currently has 21 of 23 items for sale featuring Mr. Trump’s name or face; zero feature Mr. McConnell. Mr. Trump has regularly attacked Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe party’s Senate committee has also hired Gary Coby, the architect of Mr. Trump’s 2020 digital operation who continues to work with Mr. Trump, as a fund-raising consultant, according to people familiar with the matter.Mr. Trump has begun ramping up his fund-raising operation, sending regular texts and emails that effectively compete with the party apparatus. Mr. Trump’s PAC is back advertising on Facebook, too, even as the platform has banned Mr. Trump from posting there himself.Of the all party organizations, the Republican National Committee has perhaps the trickiest line to toe because it is charged with neutrally overseeing the 2024 presidential nomination process, whether or not Mr. Trump runs.The R.N.C. worked in tandem with the Trump re-election campaign last year, raising hundreds of millions of dollars through shared accounts. A New York Times investigation in April showed how the Trump operation had used prechecked recurring donation boxes to lure unwitting donors into giving again and again — resulting in a wave of fraud complaints and demands for refunds.It turns out that some donations-on-autopilot continued all the way through June 2021, when party officials stopped processing donations to their shared account, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee. That account raised $2.6 million in June almost entirely through recurring donations, according to a person familiar with the matter, of which 75 percent was earmarked for Mr. Trump’s PAC and 25 percent to the R.N.C.But though those donations were stopped, the Trump messaging has continued, with the party hawking “Back to Back Trump Voter” shirts in recent days — yours “FREE” with a $50 donation.“He’s so good for small-dollar fund-raising,” said Liz Mair, a Republican strategist who has been critical of Mr. Trump in the past. “The party cannot financially afford to separate.” More

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      Democrats Face High New Bar in Opposing Voting Laws

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      Democrats and voting rights groups say they can no longer count on the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to serve as a backstop for preventing racially discriminatory voting restrictions.The 6-to-3 decision by the Supreme Court on Thursday that upheld voting restrictions in Arizona has effectively left voting rights advocates with a higher bar for bringing federal cases under the Voting Rights Act: proving discriminatory intent.That burden is prompting civil rights and voting groups to recalibrate their approach to challenging in court the raft of new restrictions that Republican-controlled legislatures have passed this year in the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s election loss in November. No longer, they say, can they count on the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to serve as a backstop for preventing racially discriminatory voting restrictions.“We have to remember that the Supreme Court is not going to save us — it’s not going to protect our democracy in these moments when it is most necessary that it does so,” Sam Spital, the director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said Friday.The high court gutted the central protection of the Voting Rights Act in a 2013 decision, and on Thursday the court further limited the act’s reach in combating discriminatory laws, establishing strict new guidelines for proving the laws’ effects on voters of color and thus requiring litigants to clear the much higher bar of proving purposeful intent to discriminate.Mr. Spital said his group would have to carefully assess its next moves and “think very carefully” before bringing new cases that, if defeated, could set damaging new precedents. The Arizona case, filed in 2016 by the Democratic National Committee, was considered a weak vehicle for challenging new voting laws; even the Biden administration acknowledged that the Arizona law was not discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act. Choosing the wrong cases, in the wrong jurisdictions, could lead to further setbacks, Mr. Spital and other voting rights advocates said.At the same time, Mr. Spital said, it is imperative that voting restrictions enacted by Republicans not go unchallenged.“It will force us to work even harder in the cases that we do bring,” he said. “Once the rules of the game are set, even if they are tilted against us, we have the resources — we have extraordinary lawyers, extraordinary clients, and we have the facts on our side.”Thursday’s ruling also laid bare an uncomfortable new reality for Democrats and voting activists: that under existing law, they can expect little help from the federal courts on election laws that are passed on a partisan basis by the party that controls a state government. Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Florida and Iowa have moved aggressively to push through voting laws, brushing aside protests from Democrats, voting rights groups and even major corporations.Arizona Republicans were candid about the partisan nature of their efforts when the Supreme Court heard the case in March. A lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party told the justices that the restrictions were needed because without them, Republicans in the state would be “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”“It’s much harder to prove these things — it takes a lot more evidence,” said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in voting rights and redistricting cases. “Courts are often reluctant to label legislators racist. That’s why the effects standard was added in 1982.”The high court’s decision also raises the stakes for 2022 contests for governor in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Democratic governors are poised to block measures proposed by Republican-controlled legislatures. If a Republican won the governor’s seat in any of those states, the legislature would have a clear path to pushing through new voting laws.Republicans on Friday lauded the Supreme Court ruling, calling it a validation of the need to combat voter fraud — though no evidence of widespread fraud emerged in President Biden’s victory.Justin Riemer, the chief counsel at the Republican National Committee, argued that the new “guideposts” set by Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, were welcome and would force a recognition of the broader options for voting available in a state.“It reaffirms, for example, that states have an incredibly important interest in protecting against voter fraud and promoting voter confidence,” Mr. Riemer said. “When the court looked at Arizona’s laws, it noted how generous the voting provisions were.”Mr. Riemer noted that Democrats would also have a harder time in meeting new standards for showing that laws impose unreasonable burdens on voters.“I don’t want to say completely shuts them out of Section 2, but it’s going to make it very difficult for them to strike down laws that are really minimally, if at all, burdensome,” Mr. Riemer said, referring to the section of the Voting Rights Act that addresses racially discriminatory practices.Major Supreme Court decisions affirming a new restriction on voting have historically been followed by waves of new state-level legislation. In 2011, 34 states introduced some form of new voter identification legislation after the court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law in 2008.The first immediate test of a newly emboldened legislature will come next week in Texas, where lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene for a special session, in a second attempt by Republicans to pass an election overhaul bill. The first attempt failed after Democrats in the State Legislature staged a contentious late-night walkout, temporarily halting proposals that were among the most restrictive in the country.Those proposals included bans on new methods of voting, a reduction in Sunday voting hours and provisions that would make it easier to overturn elections and would greatly empower partisan poll watchers.The uncertain legal fights will play out in a federal judiciary remade during Mr. Trump’s administration, and Democrats in Congress have failed to enact federal voter protections.The legal defense fund that Mr. Spital represents sued Georgia in May over its new voting laws, arguing that the laws would have a discriminatory effect. Other lawsuits, including one the Department of Justice filed last week, argue that Georgia acted with intent to discriminate against voters of color.But some Democrats, while lamenting the decision by the Supreme Court, noted that they still had plenty of constitutional tools to challenge repressive voting laws.“Obviously, it is now going to be more difficult to litigate,” said Aneesa McMillan, a deputy executive director at the super PAC Priorities USA, who oversees the organization’s voting rights efforts. “But most of our cases that we challenge, we challenge based on the First, the 14th and the 15th amendments of the Constitution.”Among the guideposts Justice Alito articulated is an assessment of “the standard practice” of voting in 1982, when Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was amended.“It is relevant that in 1982 States typically required nearly all voters to cast their ballots in person on election day and allowed only narrow and tightly defined categories of voters to cast absentee ballots,” Justice Alito wrote.Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling established a series of guideposts for determining whether merely the effect of a voting law is discriminatory, rather than the intent.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe court did not address the purpose clause of Section 2. But those cases often rely on racist statements by lawmakers or irregularities in the legislative process — trickier elements of a legal case to prove than the effects.“You’re not going to get that smoking gun kind of evidence,” said Sophia Lakin, the deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Voting Rights Project. “It’s pulling together a lot of circumstantial pieces to show the purpose is to take away the rights of voters of color.”People protested voting restrictions outside the Texas Capitol in Austin in May.Mikala Compton/ReutersIn Texas, some Democrats in the Legislature had been hoping that they could work toward a more moderate version of the bill in the special session that starts next week; it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court decision will induce Republicans to favor an even more restrictive bill.Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and State Representative Briscoe Cain, both Republicans, did not respond to requests for comment. Speaker Dan Phelan and State Senator Bryan Hughes, both Republicans, declined to comment.But whether the Supreme Court decision will open the floodgates for more restrictive voting legislation in other states remains an open question; more than 30 state legislatures have adjourned for the year, and others have already passed their voting laws.“It’s hard to imagine what a spike in voting restrictions would look like now, because we are already seeing such a dramatic surge, more than at any time since Reconstruction,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute. “But passing new waves of legislation has certainly been the response in recent years.”Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin is one of the Democratic governors who are holding off voting measures passed by Republican-led legislatures. On Wednesday, he vetoed the first of several pieces of Republican legislation on the electoral process.In an interview, he said Republicans’ monthslong effort to relitigate the 2020 election had had the effect of placing voting rights on the level of health care and education among the top priorities of Wisconsin voters.“It’s rising up as far as people’s recognizing that it’s an important issue,” Mr. Evers said. “They brought it on themselves, frankly, the Republicans have. I don’t think the people of Wisconsin thought the election was stolen. They understand that it was a fair election. And so the Republicans’ inability to accept Donald Trump’s loss is making it more of a bread-and-butter issue here.” More

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      How Deceptive Campaign Fund-Raising Ensnares Older People

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      Older Americans, a critical source of political donations, often fall victim to aggressive and misleading digital practices. A broad Times analysis points to the scope of the problem.William W. Vaughan Jr. was a senior atmospheric scientist at NASA during the space race and later an accomplished academic, but as with so many aging Americans, time and technology had sapped him of some of his savvy, especially online.Computers made him feel “like a duck out of water,” his son Steve Vaughan said. So when Steve was sorting through the elder Mr. Vaughan’s papers after his death at 90 in December, he was unsettled by what he found on his father’s final credit card bill.The first item was familiar: $11.82 at the local Chick-fil-A in Huntsville, Ala. But every other charge on the first page, and there were dozens of them, was to the firm that processes online Republican campaign contributions, WinRed. Over four months last year, Mr. Vaughan had made 400 donations totaling nearly $11,500 — to Donald J. Trump, Mitch McConnell, Tim Scott, Steve Scalise and many others.The sum was far beyond the realm of his financial ability, his son said, and sure enough, he soon discovered handwritten notes outlining what appeared to be his father’s call disputing the charges with his credit card company. He is still seething at the avalanche of charges and “what they did to a 90-year-old” just before his death.“If it happened to him,” he said, “I have to figure it happened to other people.”It has.Mr. Vaughan died in December at age 90.The dirty little secret of online political fund-raising is that the most aggressive and pernicious practices that campaigns use to raise money are especially likely to ensnare unsuspecting older people, according to interviews with digital strategists and an examination of federal donation and refund data.Older Americans are critical campaign contributors, both online and offline. More than half of all the online contributions processed by WinRed in the last cycle, 56 percent, came from people who listed their occupation as “retired,” federal records show.Digital operatives in both parties deploy an array of manipulative tactics that can deceive donors of all age groups: faux bill notices and official-looking correspondence; bogus offers to match donations and hidden links to unsubscribe; and prechecked boxes that automatically repeat donations, which are widely seen as the most egregious scheme.But some groups appear to specifically target older internet users, blasting out messages with subject lines like “Social Security” that have particular resonance for older people, and spending disproportionately on ads for an older audience. In many cases, the most unscrupulous tactics of direct mail have simply been rebooted for the digital age — with ruthless new precision.“Everybody knows what they’re doing: They’re scamming seniors to line their own pockets and to raise money for campaigns,” said Mike Nellis, a Democratic digital strategist who is critical of deceptive practices.“You are targeting people who are less savvy online, who are more likely to believe what’s put in front of them,” Mr. Nellis said, lamenting tactics that “erase people’s humanity.”It is impossible to tell just how many older Americans are deceived by such methods, because age is not reported on federal filings. One useful measuring stick, digital experts say, is the number of donations that are refunded — which often occurs when contributors feel unsatisfied or duped.The New York Times analyzed refund data from 2020, working with the political information firm Political Data Inc., which matched refunded donors to the voter rolls. The results provide a rare window into just how disproportionately old the universe of donors who receive refunds is.Donation refunds skewed heavily to older peopleRepublican campaigns issued refunds at far higher rates (7.4 percent of WinRed contributions) than Democratic ones (2.3 percent on ActBlue) in the 2020 election. But the age distribution for both parties among California refunds was very similar.

      Note: Donations without an age listed were excluded.Source: Federal Election Commission and Political Data, Inc.Taylor JohnstonThe findings, which looked at refunds in one large and diverse state, California, showed that the average age of donors who received refunds was almost 66 on WinRed and nearly 65 on ActBlue, the equivalent Democratic processing site.Even more revealing: More than four times as much money was refunded to donors who are 70 and older than to adults under the age of 50 — for both Republicans and Democrats.More than 65,000 unique donors, who were refunded a roughly $25 million combined last election, were matched by name and ZIP code in California. The ages of donors being refunded in both parties were very similar, even as Republican campaigns issued online refunds at more than triple the overall rate of Democrats, records show.A Times investigation earlier this year revealed how the Trump operation had made donations automatically recur weekly, and had obscured that fact with extraneous text, causing a multimillion-dollar cascade of refunds and a surge of fraud complaints.Multiple banking officials said the flood of complaints against Mr. Trump’s operation came heavily from older donors. One fraud investigator recalled the case of an 88-year-old who worried that her family would presume she was developing dementia because the repeat charges had blown past her credit card limit.Exploiting the diminishing capacity of older people for cash extends far beyond politics. There is an entire initiative at the Justice Department devoted to elder abuse, and the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported nearly $1 billion in losses for those 60 and older in 2020.Most political tactics are legal, though the Justice Department recently called out nonexistent promises to match donations as an example of “material misrepresentations.”“You leverage data, technology, emotion and digital tactics to take advantage of a population,” said Cyrus Krohn, who oversaw digital strategy at the Republican National Committee more than a decade ago and now regrets some of his earlier work. “It’s like a kid in a candy store.”A rally for former President Donald J. Trump at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, in October.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesWhy older people are ‘the perfect target’Daniel Marson, a clinical neuropsychologist who has studied financial decision-making among aging Americans, said older people face a double whammy online when combining their generational lack of familiarity with technology and age-related cognitive declines.The brain itself starts to shift with age, Dr. Marson and other neurological experts said. Processing typically begins to slow. Keeping track of multiple things is harder. Evaluating trustworthiness becomes more of a struggle.“They just don’t have the same digital literacy or capacity to engage in an internet world,” said Dr. Marson, the former director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.Certainly, millions of aging Americans are still adroit with technology and some don’t decline cognitively until a very advanced age.But even the kinds of silly deceptions that millennials and digital natives might roll their eyes at — like stress-inducing donation countdown clocks — can more easily distract or confuse many retirees who adopted computers later in life.Some campaigns use subject lines like “Final Notice #33716980” — which the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently deployed — that can make it appear as if actual bills are at risk of defaulting. Some use breathless exaggerations, like a recent text from the House Republican campaign arm, which warned it would “lose the House for good!” if everyone did not contribute $9 by midnight.A fund-raising email from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Personal information has been redacted.Many older people interpret personalized messages literally.Tatenda Musapatike, a Democratic digital strategist, recalled having to explain to some older family members that Joe Biden was not in fact the person sending them an email asking for money.“It’s not naïve or foolish,” she said. “It’s from people being less online.”The daughter of one 69-year-old donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to safeguard her father’s wishes to remain private, described a call from her mother last year asking her to intervene in his excessive online contributions. “Mom came to me and said, ‘Dad donated $25,000,’” the woman said. Records show he made hundreds of donations via WinRed to a variety of Republican campaigns.“He’s taking what they say as truth,” she said, adding that he has begun exhibiting early symptoms of mental decline and insists he has not donated as much as he actually has.While she has unsubscribed him from as many email and text lists as she can, she remains worried. “I can’t watch him 24 hours a day,” she said.Text messages sent from the National Republican Congressional Committee urged people to donate with false deadlines and promises of matching contributions.David Laibson, a behavioral economics professor at Harvard who has studied the impact of aging on financial decision-making, said studies showed that half of people in their 80s or older have either some cognitive impairment short of dementia or actual dementia.“Who’s the perfect target?” he said. “They’re in their early 80s, they have a very substantial likelihood of cognitive impairment, and they probably still haven’t depleted their retirement nest egg.”In fact, the records show that more money was refunded to donors who were 80 and older than to adults under 50, on both ActBlue and WinRed, according to the examination of California refund data.ActBlue and WinRed both said they work with customers to solve any problems they encounter, but declined to comment further.Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, which oversees federal elections administration, noted that many older Americans were particularly isolated during the coronavirus pandemic, and were simultaneously forced to be online more to connect with family and friends. “They had no choice,” she said, “so it is really easy to target them.”Ms. Klobuchar, a Democrat, recently introduced legislation to ban prechecked boxes that repeat donations after the Federal Election Commission unanimously recommended outlawing the practice in the wake of the Times investigation.“Politicians are always courting the votes of seniors,” she said. “Then, behind their backs, they’re scamming them for money. It’s pretty bad.”Some younger donors who are less internet-savvy also donated more than they intended.Daisy DeSimone, left, and her mother, Marian, at their home in New Jersey.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesMarian DeSimone, the mother of Daisy DeSimone, who has a developmental disability, said her 30-year-old daughter was entrapped in a Republican recurring donation vortex last year that involved hundreds of small contributions totaling $2,700, about 85 percent of which went to two Trump committees.In a joint interview with her mother, Daisy said she contributed more than she intended, “by a lot,” and felt “frustrated” by her experience. She was most impassioned about the overwhelming volume of solicitations: “They would keep coming back to me, they would keep emailing me and texting me.”When her mother logged into her account to try to delete her from various lists, she discovered that the “unsubscribe” link from the Republican National Committee was in plain text. Unlike every other link, it was neither bold nor blue nor underlined. You had to hover above to see that it was a link at all.“Shameful!” she thought. At first, she had blamed her daughter for the deluge of donations. Now she sees her as a victim.Mothership Strategies, a Washington-based digital consulting firm, is known for its aggressive tactics in Democratic politics.Matt McClain/The Washington Post, via Getty Images‘A systemic campaign finance abuse issue’Overall, Republican campaigns issued refunds at far higher rates (7.4 percent of WinRed contributions) than Democratic ones (2.3 percent on ActBlue) in the 2020 election, a gap driven chiefly by Mr. Trump’s prechecked boxes scheme.But some Democratic donors did feel victimized.Susan Kraus is an 81-year-old New Yorker who, federal records show, made around 175 separate donations last year via ActBlue, totaling about $4,500.“That’s impossible,” Ms. Kraus said in an interview. “Never. I don’t know how that happened. But it wasn’t me doing it.” Both she and her son, Brett Graham, said she experiences short-term memory loss.“It’s almost like they were duplicating it,” she said. “Like there were tricks.” She recalls making donations with her phone but nothing at that scale, nor to the range of groups that records show she contributed to.“There isn’t a nice way to spin it,” said Mr. Graham, who helps manage his mother’s financial affairs. “This is a systemic campaign finance abuse issue.” He added that the overlapping pattern of giving was “not what a human being would do.” He was able to receive refunds for roughly $2,500 from two credit cards.The largest share of Ms. Kraus’s donations went to two interconnected groups, Stop Republicans and the Progressive Turnout Project, that she said she had never heard of. Both organizations share a Washington-based digital consulting firm, Mothership Strategies, that Democratic critics have singled out for its aggressive tactics.Of the top 10 Democratic groups with the oldest average age for refunded donors in California during the last election that refunded at least $75,000, all were Mothership clients.Those groups had an average age range of 74 to 78, the analysis of refund data shows. (WinRed does not itemize which campaigns provide refunds to particular donors, so an equivalent examination is not possible.)More than 40 percent of Facebook ads from Stop Republicans and the Progressive Turnout Project reached users over 65, according to a public database compiled by Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic digital consultancy. In comparison, the Biden campaign devoted 18.5 percent of its Facebook ads to that demographic.Mothership said that it does not target people by age. Instead, it said, it screens based on interests and likelihood to donate — and that older people are simply more reliable donors.“We’re proud to raise the funds that allow our clients to outcompete Republican super PACs and elect progressive and diverse Democrats across the country,” Maya Garcia, a principal at Mothership, said in a statement. She added that the leaders of the firm “never want anyone to make an accidental contribution,” that it displays its organizations’ names prominently and that it works “to ensure all refund requests are handled quickly.”The company declined to say if it receives a commission on money it raises online. The Washington Post reported in 2019 that its commission was as high as 15 percent.A debate among Democrats on tacticsToday, most leading Republican groups deploy prechecked recurring boxes and other aggressive tactics, but in Democratic circles a debate is raging about the ethics of online solicitations. There are two clear camps: those who rose through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s House fund-raising arm, and its highly aggressive program, including Mothership Strategies, and those more aligned with the presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders.The D.C.C.C.’s operation is one of the few Democratic groups that continue to use the prechecked boxes. It has also experimented with another processing platform while ActBlue moves to block the practice entirely. In June, one fund-raising pitch came from a sender listed as “SOCIAL SECURITY UPDATE (via DCCC)” — though on platforms like Gmail, the D.C.C.C. part was cut off unless people clicked through.Murshed Zaheed, a veteran Democratic digital consultant, is among those pushing for what he calls “ethical email,” which he defined as not deceiving supporters.“I cannot tell you how much I hate the words ‘email list,’” he said. He said the phrase “dehumanizes” people and treats them “as A.T.M. machines.”For Mr. Vaughan, the former NASA scientist, his final credit card bill was a maze of repeating charges to the same campaigns, sometimes on the same day.The note his son discovered had the words “WinRed charges to be refunded” written clearly. It was dated Nov. 25 — the same day that federal records show $1,144 was refunded.It was only about 10 percent of his total giving. His son has been unable to recoup the rest.Rachel Shorey contributed research. More