mr. clean magic eraser

This morning I saw an article on the front page of my Los Angeles Times that I wanted to share via a tweet from my phone: “Bernie Sanders’ campaign legacy could be how he raises money from so many people.” The piece covered a few things, including how “ActBlue is a decade-old nonprofit that creates fundraising software to help Democrats build networks of donors,” and how Bernie Sanders’ campaign has benefited greatly by partnering with them, as have Democrats in general.

But before I linked to the Times article, I wanted to pull a quote to add to the tweet. However, there was a problem: When I went to copy the quote from the digital version of the article, it was missing. In fact, an entire paragraph had vanished, yet there was no mention online of anything having been edited out or corrected.

Weird, huh? I thought so.

I also thought it was a valuable, informative paragraph, especially because Sanders has been accused of not helping down-ticket candidates. By using ActBlue, he provides some real advantages to them, per the missing paragraph:

LATimes missing paragraph

“Hillary Clinton is not using ActBlue, a platform not typically associated with large-scale presidential campaigns. Nobody envisioned Sanders would be such a fundraising powerhouse when he linked his campaign to it, but his phenomenal success bringing in money through ActBlue– recruiting new Express users for it– helped usher in a new era for the app, one that opens new fundraising opportunities to Democrats up and down the ballot.“

Here’s how it reads now:

But the Sanders campaign has touched off an explosion in ActBlue’s growth by routing much of its fundraising through the nonprofit. ActBlue has expanded to the point where it resembles a Silicon Valley firm that has just been through a wildly successful IPO. So many people have enlisted as ActBlue “Express” users on the way to giving a few bucks to Sanders that the organization now boasts it has the credit-card information of some 2.7 million liberal sympathizers.

“Many of these people are making a contribution to a campaign for the first time in their lives,” said Michael Whitney, digital fundraising manager for Sanders. “ActBlue makes it very easy for them to give their second, third and fourth contributions. … They are going to want to see how else they can participate, what else they can support.” The next time one of the thousands of Democratic campaigns using ActBlue asks them for $5 or $10, all they need to do is hit a button on their phone and the deed is done.

Republican donors, by contrast, are more likely to have to start all over once the campaign ends and they want to enlist with another cause. It’s like an Uber addict visiting in a city where the only option for a short ride is competitor Lyft: They might download the app, register, and punch in all the digits of their credit card, or they might just walk.

You can see why it might have been a relevant component to the story. You can read the entire post here. It’s worth a look.