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Former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison is jumping on the Substack trend, but he seems to have overlooked the fine print.
Harrison appears to have run afoul of Substack’s terms of service by mass-subscribing his former campaign email list and other personal contacts. Substack’s rules say: “Don’t add people to your mailing list without their consent, and don’t import your contacts list or social graphs.” And Substack emphasizes that subscribers should have “explicitly opted in,” according to a Substack spokesperson.
Harrison recently uploaded those on his 2020 Senate campaign list and other contacts he had collected over the years, though he made that clear to subscribers when he started his Substack. His introductory email last week stated, “As a past member of my email list, you have been automatically subscribed to my new hub on Substack.” Harrison has a Substack podcast where he’s interviewed Democrats including Hunter Biden, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and he also started a paid subscription section for superfans to get early access to podcasts and bonus content.
The way he built his Substack list, however, has attracted negative attention online, with several X users expressing outrage that they were added to his Substack without their permission or even knowledge. One user wrote, “The horrors of giving my email to Democrats never cease. Why tf did I get auto-subscribed to Jaime Harrison’s Substack,” while another wrote, “Just found out I was automatically subscribed to Jaime Harrison’s Substack without my knowledge or consent.”
The spokesperson for Substack, granted anonymity to speak freely, declined to comment on Harrison’s case but said the company’s guidelines “require that any mailing list a publisher imports be made up of people who have explicitly opted in to receive emails from that publication” and that lists purchased or collected without consent (which frequently happens on campaigns) are not permitted. The spokesperson bolded the phrase “explicitly opted in.”
The spokesperson said Substack runs basic checks for issues including invalid addresses but that it doesn’t have a way to verify how emails were collected.
Harrison said in a brief phone interview that he “assumed” his team had followed Substack’s rules but added, “For me, knowing email stuff and all that other stuff, I don’t follow this stuff.” In a follow-up text message, he said he had abided by all Substack policies and that his team “worked directly with Substack to upload our list, which was collected from my Senate campaign and other personal activities.” A spokesperson for Harrison declined to give POLITICO the name of the Substack representative they dealt with and said such interactions were done only over the phone.
Several other Democratic politicians with Substacks have chosen different ways to build up their newsletter lists. A person familiar with Pete Buttigieg’s Substack, granted anonymity to discuss the matter, said the former transportation secretary is only using organic ways to grow his Substack, which has around 600,000 followers, and that his team doesn’t pull any lists over.
A spokesperson for Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he’s also grown his Substack organically and didn’t think it was necessary to pull subscribers from his campaign email list. The person said the video interviews the senator has done with anti-Trump influencers Jim Acosta and Jennifer Rubin, as well as journalist Anand Giridharadas, have been very helpful in adding new subscribers, now totaling more than 65,000.
Last week, Harrison’s Substack showed that he had a million subscribers, but most of Harrison’s posts have less than a dozen likes. After POLITICO started asking questions, the number of subscribers became private. A Harrison spokesperson declined to comment on why the subscription number is no longer public.
For years, Democratic consultants have raised concerns that Democratic politicians are exhausting donors with too many emails, but Substack is a new platform on which Democrats can grow — and annoy — people in their orbit.
“Substack prohibits unsolicited spam for a reason,” said Josh Nelson, CEO of progressive ad platform Civic Shout. “Jaime Harrison, as a former DNC chair, should know better than to add people to an email list without their knowledge or consent.”
Another Democratic consultant, granted anonymity because of fear of business consequences, said leaders of many progressive organizations and other influential Democrats now have Substacks that he joked they view as their “retirement plan.”
“It’s so dumb because obviously there’s not enough people on Substack to pay $5 a month for all these people, and they all use tons of organizational resources to pump up their own Substacks, which is so corrupt and such a misallocation of resources,” the consultant said.
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