Maine Democratic Senate Candidate Sits at Nexus of Spam PAC Network

Jordan Wood and Jake Lipsett have spent their careers in the Mothership vortex

Candidate Jordan Wood hosts a “Courage Not Concern” Town Hall. Source: Jordan Wood on X.

Maine Senate Candidate Is One Half of Democrat’s Email Spam Power Couple

Jordan Wood spent his career working for PACs linked to the notorious Mothership Strategies.

A Democratic Senate candidate running in Maine on a platform of getting money out of politics has spent his career entangled with controversial PACs created by the notorious email fundraising firm Mothership Strategies. The firm pioneered the hair-on-fire fundraising tactics that often send more money to political consultants than to political candidates.

Mothership was recently the subject of yet another viral investigation that revealed that of the $678 million the company’s core political action committees raised since 2018, just $11 million went to candidates; $159 million made its way to Mothership Strategies. Meanwhile, the firm’s spammy approach to email and text messaging—mock overdue bills, sky-is-falling rhetoric, and so on—has left the grassroots commons desiccated, draining email fundraising of its potency and driving many campaigns toward SMS (which is in the process of being destroyed itself).

Most fundraising firms, in order to find business, pitch themselves to political action committees (PACs) and to candidates. Mothership does that, but also innovated on the notion by simply making its own PACs and then turning them into clients. As long as the PACs spend some of the money they raise on political purposes—contributions to candidates, canvassing operations, producing ads, and so on—they are perfectly legal enterprises.

Now, Mothership has pointed its money vacuum at the Maine Senate race, a true motherlode for fundraising consultants: In 2020, Democrat Sara Gideon raised just under $75 million directly to her campaign before losing to Collins. Yes, $75 million. Outside groups raised and spent another $55 million to boost her or attack Collins, and Gideon even finished with more than $10 million unspent in the bank. Collins and the Republican side raised and spent an equivalent fortune. Even a reasonable percentage of that haul adds up to a small treasure trove, and Mothership has never been accused of taking too small of a cut.

The candidate is named Jordan Wood, and he’s been executive director of two PACs in the Mothership ecosystem. His husband, Jake Lipsett, is a co-founder of Mothership and remains a partner. After Gideon’s loss, in 2021, Wood and Lipsett bought a 4,000-sq.-ft. lakeside home in Bristol, Maine, for $2.15 million—now valued at more than $3 million. “Jordan was born and raised in Lewiston, Maine, and always dreamed of moving home to Maine to raise his family. When Jake and Jordan began planning to start their family, they moved home to Maine,” said Sarah McCarthy, a campaign spokesperson for Wood’s campaign.

Out of the gate, Wood was quickly endorsed by Progressive Turnout Project, and Defend the Vote—both PACs use Mothership for their fundraising, a firm widely derided for their predatory fundraising tactics and minimal level of genuine political activity. In 2019, the Washington Post reported that Mothership’s “lightning-quick rise also has sparked consternation in Democratic circles, where Mothership is sometimes derided as the ‘M-word,’ because of its aggressive and sometimes misleading tactics.”

Defend the Vote, since launching in the 2020 cycle, has raised and spent just over $11 million, according to FEC records. Of that total, $3.8 million has gone to Mothership. Spending well over 30 percent of a total organization’s budget on a single fundraising consultant is considered highly unusual. PTP, meanwhile, has raised and spent more than $310 million since its launch in 2015. Of that total, $39 million went to Mothership.

Even that large number is deceiving, however, as FEC records show PTP got nearly $90 million of its cash from “affiliated committees.” Those committees use Mothership for their fundraising and then move the money to PTP. A budget of PTP’s size—the organization raised $90.3 million for the 2024 cycle—would typically make a political organization a significant player in Democratic politics, but Progressive Turnout Project has left barely any visible footprint outside of your email inbox. (Go search for “progressive turnout project” in your inbox, you probably get their emails.) A spokesperson for PTP rejected that characterization. “Mothership Strategies has helped power our efforts since day one. The funds we've spent on our digital fundraising program have allowed us to become the largest Democratic field organization in the country other than the presidential campaign,” said PTP.

The two PACs have already deployed their massive email lists in the service of fundraising for Wood, whose campaign said he has already raised more than $2 million. From a political perspective, the early endorsements were puzzling, as 77-year-old Maine Gov. Janet Mills has yet to decide whether to run, which had the effect of largely freezing the field of candidates. The PACs endorsed before knowing who else would run. In the meantime, a new insurgent candidate, oysterman and veteran Graham Platner has emerged as a credible challenger, running on a platform of taking on the billionaires on behalf of the working class.

A spokesperson for Wood said that his campaign would not work with Mothership. “Jordan for Maine has not, and will not, hire Jordan’s husband's firm; we are working with a competitor,” said McCarthy, the spokesperson for Wood’s campaign. “Jordan is running for Senate because he believes our representatives should be accountable to regular folks, not billionaires or the elites, which is why he won’t take a dime from corporate PACs or lobbyists.”

Wood began as the political director for End Citizens United, which was birthed by Mothership in 2015 as a campaign-finance reform project. Wood helped get it off the ground, becoming its finance and PAC director in November 2015, and later its political director and vice president, leaving in January 2020, according to an ECU spokesperson. While Wood was there, ECU paid Mothership more than $9 million while raising $73 million, the spokesperson said. The Wood campaign said Wood recused himself from ECU’s dealings with Mothership once he and Lipsett began dating.

The PAC eventually became independent of Mothership—completely cutting ties in 2023. (Notably, while Defend the Vote has endorsed Wood for Senate, ECU has not, despite the fact that he served as its executive director, strengthening ECU’s claim to independence from the Mothership network.)

In the 2022 cycle, the Mothership ecosystem grew, with the advent of a new PAC, democracyFIRST PAC, which made Wood executive director in September 2022. Wood stepped down in April 2025 to run for Senate, while Lipsett remains a partner at Mothership, which now boasts on its website of having raised nearly a billion for clients.

The PAC under Wood’s leadership did not initially hire Mothership for email fundraising and, instead, relied instead on a handful of major donors, including $3.5 million the first cycle from philanthropist Lynn Schusterman. But as he left, Mothership came in, and DF ended up shoveling huge amounts of money their way.

The month he left, the PAC funneled more than $500,000 to Mothership, followed by another two payments nearing $100,000 total in May and June. Wood’s campaign did not address Drop Site’s specific questions about these payments; Mothership did not respond to a request for comment.

Then he transferred control of democracyFIRST to PTP, which subsequently endorsed him. In March 2023, before Wood left, according to filings with the FEC, democracyFIRST named Harry Pascal, co-founder of Progressive Turnout Project, as its treasurer and custodian of records, switched its mailing address to the same address used by PTP, and named a slew of Mothership PACs as “affiliated committees.” PTP’s co-founder Hannah Giltner now runs democracyFIRST.

“PTP was inspired by the work democracyFIRST was doing and wanted to fold it in to their operation to augment their existing state and local work,” said Wood’s campaign spokesperson McCarthy.

In March 2025, democracyFIRST became affiliated with Progressive Turnout Project. We're proud of the work democracyFIRST has done on the ground electing pro-democracy candidates with field support in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, and Progressive Turnout Project wanted to ensure that work would continue into the 2026 cycle. democracyFIRST and Progressive Turnout Project were two of the only organizations to provide support to Pennsylvania State Senator James Malone in his upset special election victory in March. Currently, democracyFIRST is on pace to spend $1 million in field support for local elections in Pennsylvania this fall, and is preparing 2026 plans for Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

Progressive Turnout Project, meanwhile, is making Maine a “priority race,” it has announced on their site. Progressive Turnout Project, the sister PAC to Woods’s democracyFIRST PAC, is likely going to raise tens of millions of dollars from people hoping to oust Susan Collins, much of which will be funneled to Lipsett’s Mothership.

The leadership of the Democratic Party is well aware of the problem of spammy PACS, yet the problem has just gotten worse over time. In 2016, I edited an investigation by Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost on Mothership and End Citizens United, which had gotten off the ground in March 2015. Along with Lipsett, Mothership Strategies was founded by two veterans of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes, who had done online fundraising for the party’s organization in charge of electing Democrats to the House of Representatives. In its first year, Blumenthal reported, ECU raised $11 million but sent a third of it to fundraising consultants—including half a million to Mothership Strategies, more than the $458,500 it gave to endorsed candidates. The group would go on to build other PACs, including not only Progressive Turnout Project but also National Democratic Training Committee, Stop Republicans, and others. Mothership PACs pioneered the tactic of signing donors up automatically for recurring contributions, a practice that ActBlue, the party’s fundraising platform, eventually barred as deceptive.

In January 2019, with Mothership still humming, a Washington Post exposé took the network apart, highlighting the way money flowed from the network of PACs to Mothership, even remarking on the marriage between Wood and Lipsett. The Post reported that Progressive Turnout Project “raised $23 million during the 2018 election cycle. About $4 million—17 percent of their total expenditures—went to Mothership for email fundraising and voter persuasion.” The paper also reported that the couple’s Goldendoodle had been named after “West Wing” character C.J. Cregg.

In the wake of the report, candidate campaigns largely stopped using Mothership, but its ability to extract massive sums of money for its own PACs continued.

“Through 2024, Progressive Turnout Project and its affiliated organizations have supported 2,227 Democrats in competitive campaigns, raised more than $368 million from more than 2.4 million unique donors, and deployed 38,962 paid team members,” said a spokesperson for PTP. “These organizers helped make more than 190 million voter contact attempts at doors and through our innovative field programs.”

After leaving ECU, Wood served the 2020 cycle as chief of staff to Rep. Katie Porter, who is one of the party’s top online fundraising powerhouses. (She was criticized in 2024 for selling her list of donors as a cash grab during her unsuccessful run for Senate.)

In a roundabout way, many of the fundraising consultants will genuinely get money out of politics, syphoning political contributions from small donors, but never spending it on campaigns. That’s likely not exactly what voters have in mind.

Progressive Turnout Project, in a statement, said that it stands by its early endorsement of Wood. “We've been familiar with Jordan's work for years and we also understand the importance of fielding a strong competitor against an entrenched Republican incumbent as early as possible,” the statement read. “We believe Jordan continues to be the most formidable candidate to take on Susan Collins.”