Democrats Embrace the Grift – By Alex Pareene (New Republic) / Feb 6 2020
The decidedly Trumpian nonprofit behind the Iowa app debacle
The press accounts of the App That Failed during the Iowa caucuses this week were probably most Americans’ introduction to Acronym, the Democratic nonprofit responsible for developing the app, but journalists have had a chance to scrutinize the organization for almost three years. Acronym launched in 2017, to overwhelmingly credulous coverage. Axios wrote that it creates “‘breakthrough digital [campaigns]’ online and on mobile to reach progressive voters during crucial campaigns.” That was the general tenor of most stories written about Acronym, basically, up through Monday night.
Reading those stories now brought me to a depressing realization: The people who said they were going to beat Donald Trump in 2020 by emulating his supposedly highly sophisticated digital targeting operation have instead emulated Trump by turning their campaigns into a lucrative grift for a small group of well-connected party insiders. And, because this is the Democrats we are talking about, they did so by burning enormous sums of money that could have done untold good, politically and strategically, had they been used for just about anything else.
The very public failure of the app led, at least, to some useful reporting on the opaque dealings of the organization that sponsored its creation. Acronym is a 501(c)(4), a “social welfare” nonprofit that can shield the names of its donors. That is one of the conventional things about it. Less conventional, perhaps, is that Acronym has spent the last few years acquiring and starting for-profit companies, such as Shadow, the company behind the IowaReporterAPP from which Acronym has been ineptly distancing itself since the caucus debacle.
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