If you respect your own voters, you don’t do this (boldface mine):

Jon Ossoff is losing! Oh, never mind, he’s winning! Actually, just give up and go home—or donate now, and take advantage of a special matching offer!

Subtract Ossoff’s name, and you could be forgiven for thinking this is a pitch from the Home Shopping Network, rather than emails produced by a congressional campaign. They reflect old marketing tactics—blitz your audience, mislead them if necessary—and they are divisive. Proponents insist that the emails, as deranged as they might seem, work. Critics argue that the tactic has a short shelf life and is deceptive.

And in an era when email has become a crucial tool in reaching voters and raising money, they raise a broader question: Is this the best way for the Democratic Party to rebuild itself?

…With Mothership Strategies consulting, the campaign launched a frenetic email fundraising drive that contributed to the race becoming the most expensive in the history of the House. Mothership was founded by DCCC veterans, and the online fundraising strategy it helped the Ossoff campaign develop is a descendant of the DCCC’s infamous 2014 strategy, which the Daily Beast described as “part fundraising pitch, part hostage note.”

The Ossoff emails warned of electoral doomsday. The subject lines often contradicted emails that had been sent earlier that day. As election day neared, the pace increased. The campaign bombarded its email list with increasingly desperate pleas for money—or psychological intervention, depending on your interpretation…

Kenneth Pennington, the former digital director of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, calls this a “churn and burn” approach that exploits voters. “A dirty secret in the email fundraising industry is that most of the people giving are senior citizens,” he told the New Republic in an email. “For a less net-savvy generation some of these emails that put you on ‘FINAL NOTICE’ are confusing and scary enough. The prospect that your donation will be quadruple-matched may also be enticing, if you really believe it.”

Pennington also believes the DCCC approach achieves short-term results at the expense of long-term strategic goals. “There’s a limited pool of Democratic small-dollar donors out there,” he said. “When the Ossoff campaign and DCCC run a churn-and-burn program like this, it sullies the pond for every other Democratic cause. When people get turned off by fundraising emails, they tune out. Not just from the bad programs, but from the good ones. Everyone from Elizabeth Warren to UNICEF is going to feel that.”