With the 2026 Midterms are behind us and Democrats seeing the most successful Blue Tsunami in at least 50 years, I have even more good news to report!
Perhaps the biggest single complaint all of us have about modern campaign fundraising is the endless deluge of spam emails & text messages from dozens of political campaigns begging us to donate to them.
In most cases, not only did we never knowingly sign up for their mailing lists, we often had never even heard of the candidate before! It’s been a growing problem for years which reached critical mass during the 2026 election cycle.
To be clear: In spite of what many people think, ActBlue is not the one selling your contact data to third party organizations or campaigns which you didn’t actually donate to. In many cases it’s the campaigns themselves who are doing so. Remember, ActBlue is legally required by campaign finance law to provide SOME of your contact info to the campaigns which in turn have to provide that to the FEC (or state campaign finance agencies), such as your name, mailing address, employer and the like.
In addition, as I've written about several times before, the reality is that it's absurdly easy for 3rd-party "data brokers" to scrape the internet and match up your email and/or phone number with fundraising/donation data. Yes, it's officially illegal to use FEC data in this way (and I'm guessing most state-level campaign finance laws have similar prohibitions), but that doesn't stop some unscrupulous actors from doing so anyway.
Even without actual FEC data, it's still easy for these companies to put together your publicly available email/phone numbers with other data to model whether you're a likely donor, and voila: You're on a dozen lists.
Having said that, ActBlue is not legally required to forward your email or phone number to the campaigns, and the fact that they have a policy of doing so by default has been a major gripe of mine with them for years.
As someone who raised over $2.1 million for over 3,300 Democratic candidates this election cycle (and over $23 million for them over the past decade) without ever sending a single text message or fundraising email, this issue has special resonance for me.
UNTIL NOW, there has been a partial workaround for this: ActBlue has long included a tool in the administration settings for every "tandem" (ie, slate) page which, when enabled, causes a popup window to appear during the checkout process that looks like so:
"By default, when a donor gives on a Tandem form, their contact information is shared with every recipient on the form. If you are the managing entity on a Tandem form and you want to change this default setting so that donors are asked after they give whether they want to share their contact information with the other recipients on the Tandem form, change this setting to “ Yes.” This will show donors a pop-up box after they've donated that asks them to opt-in to share their information."
On the one hand, this is somewhat helpful, as it lets me give those who donate via my pages the ability to opt out of sharing their email/phone numbers with the campaigns.
On the other hand, this still has several problems:
- It isn't enabled by default
- When it is enabled, the default setting is to share their info; you have to actively select "Not now"
- It doesn't show up until the checkout process, after they've already committed to making a donation
- It likely confuses a lot of donors due to the cryptic phrasing
- If they have a popup blocker enabled on their web browser it will never appear at all
Back in early September, ActBlue reached out to me to join their product development team on a Zoom call so they could get some feedback from me about the types of changes & improvements I’d like to see made to their platform.
The very first item on my list was for them to address the problem of them sharing donor email/phone number data with the campaigns, party committees and other PACs/organizations on the pages by default.
To be clear: I’m not the only one who was pushing them to address this; they informed me that they’ve gotten similar advice from others as well.
What I had in mind was for them to add something like this to the main donor options, with the radio button defaulting to “no:”
I didn’t hear back on this for awhile, which made sense since we were rapidly approaching the final stretch of the midterm election season. I had no idea whether they would actually make any substantive changes or not, but I knew that if they did, those changes wouldn’t be announced until after the dust had settled on the 2026 midterms.
AND THEN, SURE ENOUGH, A FEW DAYS AGO, ACTBLUE CONTACTED ME TO INFORM ME OF AN LONG OVERDUE POLICY CHANGE!
They didn’t add the radio button tool to the main page for the donor that I suggested, but what they did do is just as good.
Check out what the administrative tool looks like for this feature now:
I wrote back just to double-check what this means, and ActBlue support confirmed it officially:
"That's right! the NO setting for this feature on any page now means that donor email/phone numbers WILL NOT BE SHARED with the recipients listed on that page."
No more popups needed. No more opting out needed.
This is HUGE!
Now, there’s two important caveats here:
- First: This feature is not enabled on all fundraising pages by default; the page administrator still has to change the admin settings and select “No” for it to take effect.
- Second: This feature is only available on tandem pages--that is, slate pages, aka pages which include more than one recipient. Since most ActBlue pages only raise money for a single recipient (these are the ones used on most Dem campaign websites, for instance), this is not a blanket change to every ActBlue page on the web.
It is, however, an across the board policy for MY slate fundraising pages; Every one of them is set up to NOT share your email or phone number with the recipients.
Just to be clear, none of this will prevent you from being spammed if you’re ALREADY on a bunch of mailing/text message lists, and there are other ways for campaigns to get ahold of your email/phone number, so it’s not a panacea.It will, however, make it HARDER for them to do so…and at the very least, donors will have the peace of mind of knowing that it won’t come via any of MY fundraising pages.
Frankly, the only other addition I can think of would be to add some sort of "Verified Not to Share" badge or whatever which automatically appears on the donor page when the "NO" option is selected. I can’t even link to the appropriate policy page since this feature is so new that ActBlue hasn’t even updated their FAQ to include it yet!In the meantime, I’ve started adding the following text to my fundraising pages:
NOTE: Thanks to a new feature offered by ActBlue, your email address/phone number WILL NOT BE SHARED with donation recipients!
November 2028 is already approaching…