Commissions, American flags, and gift cards: Vivek Ramaswamy and Doug Burgum unveiled their own novel incentives for donors to their presidential campaigns this week, raising questions about the legality and ethics around their respective schemes.
Ramaswamy is encouraging donors to recruit others to donate to his campaign by offering a 10 percent commission on the contributions they raise. Burgum, meanwhile, said he will give away $20 gift cards to the first 50,000 donors who donate even $1 to his campaign.
So much for T-shirts and yard signs.
Ramaswamy says his new plan is actually an attack on the "disgusting" status quo where a "small oligopoly of political fundraisers" make an "ungodly" amount of money doing what they do.
"I want to help you do it — build the skills needed to help you sell effectively," Ramaswamy said. "And believe me, if you can sell a politician's vision, you can sell anything in this country. We're going to help you be successful."
Despite critics of Ramaswamy's plan suggesting it resembles a multilevel marketing scheme, Michael Toner, an election lawyer and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told me he doesn't see anything illegal about it.
"I think from an FEC compliance perspective, I don't see any problems with it. . . . A fundraising consultant has been paid on commission for decades, so it's an established part of that process," he said. "But from a tax perspective, from an IRS, labor-law perspective, kind of uncharted. It doesn't mean that it's a problem, it just means there's some unsorted issues there."
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