MeidasTouch

rollingstone  | Last August, in the midst of a presidential battle that would determine the future of America, an upstart liberal group called MeidasTouch sent its supporters an urgent call to action. “Tonight is a huge night,” MeidasTouch declared on Twitter. “We are giving half of our contributions directly and immediately to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We are proud to have already chipped in 25K to their campaign. RT and chip in here.”

For MeidasTouch, the pro-Biden blitz was part of a rapidly expanding political action committee that turned viral tweets and posts into campaign contributions. Founded by three brothers, the group says it has generated more than a billion views on social media, mocking and humiliating Trump and his enablers. Crowd favorites included “Creepy Trump,” “Bye Ivanka,” and “Bye Don Jr: Love Me, Daddy!” Its podcast has become a popular destination on the anti-Trump circuit, with recent guests including Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell and Ted Lieu, and Mary Trump, the former president’s estranged niece. All this exposure translated into more than $5 million in contributions from #Resistance donors desperate to oust Trump and his Republican collaborators.

The three brothers who founded MeidasTouch sell themselves as the progressive breakout success of the 2020 election cycle, weaving a narrative of a start-from-scratch operation that — thanks to a gift for creating viral anti-Trump videos and a unique understanding of the digital tides — rapidly blossomed into a behemoth of Democratic politics. “We’ve become the most recognizable and impactful brand name in progressive politics in the 30 days since we launched,” Ben Meiselas, the eldest brother, told Adweek in June. They aren’t, per their own telling, just the top brand, they’re also pioneers of a radical transparency model that the notoriously opaque world of Super PACs could stand to learn from. “I knew that PACs in general, political action committees, have a reputation about them,” Meiselas said on a recent MeidasTouch podcast. “And I wanted this to be so different from every other PAC, starting with the fact that me, who works for this every day, doesn’t get paid. But, two, to have the most ridiculous amount of transparency possible.”

But the full story of MeidasTouch is more complicated. The group spent more than $1 million on an advertising strategy that it calls revolutionary but campaign veterans and independent experts say is nonsensical and a more effective tool for fundraising than for helping Democrats win elections. And despite its promised transparency, MeidasTouch’s financial structure makes a dollar-for-dollar accounting of its spending impossible — and, according to a former Federal Election Commission attorney, raises some of the same legal issues that got the Trump campaign into trouble in 2020.

It’s not hard to find examples of how MeidasTouch’s grandiose self-promotion doesn’t match reality. Take, for example, the fundraising plea blasted out last August. The Super PAC, per its own disclosure forms, didn’t donate $25,000 to the Biden campaign — and indeed, a direct donation from MeidasTouch to Biden would have violated campaign-finance laws. Instead, the donations came from people who clicked on an embedded link in Meidas’ tweet and were given the option to split their donation between the Biden campaign and the Super PAC. Donors gave $31,623 to the Biden campaign, and MeidasTouch received nearly $30,000.