Near the end of every month, in-boxes begin to fill with desperation. Not for love, though it sort of is, but for cash. Your cash. Not from the mythical Nigerian Prince desperate to cut you in on his fortune if you’d only help him get it out of his country, but an equally fraught plea from political candidates hoping you’ll beat the latest deadline and help improve their bottom line before this “important” date. Like the Prince, they’re scams.
First off, let me say that if you’re inclined to give money to a politician running for office, more power to you. It’s your money, you can do with it whatever you want. (Though, if you’ve got piles of it laying around and want to unburden yourself of some, shoot me an email and I’ll happily make your burden less so (I’m a hero like that.) But the fundraising emails attempting to impose a sense of urgency and importance around a certain date, any date, are absurd.
The only dates that matter, and they only matter from a PR perspective, are the ends of each reporting quarter. It’s…well, we’ll call it “junk” measuring time, when all the campaigns have to publicly report how much they’ve raised and reporters rush to use this as an indication of support and future outcomes. It reinforces narratives more than anything else.
Quarterly reports are, well, filed at the end of quarters. The last of which was the end of June. So, any talk of deadlines outside of those is a straight-up manipulation tactic.
Joe Biden is the example I’ll use here because he’s been using this approach a lot, but you can pretty much insert any candidate’s name because they all do it.
