STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
An employee of a Republican fundraising firm says he quit. Miles Bruner says he wants to make amends for his politics.
MILES BRUNER: For so long, I was working on a project that I feel severely damaged our democracy.
INSKEEP: Bruner first wrote his story on the website The Bulwark. He was not a household name, but a guy in the trenches who said he worked for years sending out fundraising appeals he considers deceptive. We invited Bruner to talk about it, and three weeks later, he came by. There is a story behind that delay.
I saw your article. We reached out. Initially, we heard you...
BRUNER: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...Stopped doing interviews.
BRUNER: (Laughter) Yeah. That's correct.
INSKEEP: And then we heard, well, that was because it was kind of overwhelming.
BRUNER: Yes, it was.
INSKEEP: Criticizing your political tribe in such a divisive time stirs a lot of reactions.
BRUNER: Explosive rants, and then people, like, targeting your family, and stuff you really just never think you would ever see.
INSKEEP: He went dark for a while but also heard from supporters who persuaded him the criticism was just words. Bruner is a Californian who says he became political in high school, arguing against the liberals on the debate team. He went on to work for a Republican state senator and recalls a moment he grew uncomfortable - his boss publicly criticized a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
BRUNER: But we got pushback almost immediately because we had said that the girl killed was a hero, and we kind of had to, like, walk some of it back or, I mean, delete the post. It was so defeating because if we weren't able to call out these attacks, what could we call out? I literally went home, and I cried.
INSKEEP: You hung on, though, in the party for quite some time. Moved to Washington, in fact...
BRUNER: Yes.
INSKEEP: ...And worked not for a campaign directly, but for a company. What was that like?
BRUNER: Personally, the work I was doing aside, I'd tell everyone I worked for a great company. I made a decent wage. I was able to start a family because of them.
INSKEEP: Campaign Solutions is the name of the company, and they would work for...
BRUNER: Yeah, they did digital fundraising for candidates, PACs, committees, that kind of stuff.
INSKEEP: So great company. But...
BRUNER: But we were writing pretty inflammatory fundraising emails on a daily basis. And it was stuff that I found personally abhorrent. But again, you kind of compartmentalize and you rationalize away a lot of those internal disagreements.
INSKEEP: You write in the article, quote, "it was routine to publish content that pushed election fraud conspiracies, stoked anti-immigrant sentiment and sowed distrust in our institutions."
BRUNER: Yeah.
INSKEEP: Do you remember a particular fundraising email or whatever it was that did that?
BRUNER: I had a couple of candidates right after the 2020 election. We pushed out. And then they had no evidence in their specific elections that there was any fraud or any untoward behavior by election officials or the Democratic Party. But we took the initiative to say, we don't know what Democrats are up to. Like, this election can go either way because of potential fraud. We need your help. Send money. So that was pretty routine, especially right after the 2020 election.
INSKEEP: I think now about why you went along with it and did it. Did you just think, I'm basically their representative. It's like I'm their lawyer. This is their point of view. I'm helping them get across their point of view?
BRUNER: Yeah. You kind of do whatever it takes to win at that point. You figure this is the direction the party's already going, and so the copy is, for lack of a better term, it's working. You know what's getting engagement, and you know that talking about fraud, despite you having no specific knowledge or evidence, is going to work. And so you're going to push whatever you can that maximizes the engagement or dollars in the door for your candidate.
INSKEEP: True in social media. True in fundraising.
BRUNER: Yes, very true. And they kind of worked hand in glove together. Whatever is working on social media, they inform what will work on email, and then vice versa. So you're always in conversation with each other.
INSKEEP: You describe a personal experience that finally pushed you over the edge. In 2023, I think. What happened?
BRUNER: What happened in 2023 had to do with the Supreme Court and the Dobbs decision. I had been pro-life as a kid - younger - and then as I got older, I became more pro-choice, but it still wasn't something I've - like, I voted on. It was just kind of something in the background. But yeah, then the Dobbs decision happened. I didn't think much of it, but then my wife and I, we were expecting our first child, and then, unfortunately, we had a miscarriage. The impact of Dobbs all of a sudden became very real to us.
INSKEEP: Meaning, you were thinking about what if we had needed?
BRUNER: Yeah, what if we had needed it? What if something had been slightly different? What if we had been in a different part of the country? Then it just became unfathomable to me 'cause this was already a tragedy we were dealing with. Like, we struggled with it for several months. And then to have that other layer of not having the support of the medical community or your own government to help, I just couldn't fathom that, and that's one of the things that really began pushing me over the edge.
INSKEEP: You say pushing you over the edge. I'm now picturing you clinging to the edge because you stayed on a couple more years.
BRUNER: Yeah, I stayed on a couple more years. And the reasons that is because, again, you find excuses. If something's comfortable, you cling on as much as you can because it's something you know.
INSKEEP: Do you remember the day that you decided, I'm really, really doing this. I'm really quitting. I'm writing about it?
BRUNER: For me, it was seeing the masked federal agents in our streets. That's what kind of pushed me over the edge because all up until that point, I was kind of able to rationalize, compartmentalize. And to say, like, I'm just a cog in the machine. I don't matter. And I woke up and I realized, like, there's no way I would be able to justify this to my daughter, like, when she's an adult. I couldn't explain this away.
INSKEEP: I could envision someone listening to this interview who's more conservative saying, sure, you were inside the machine, you didn't like the sausage being made. You didn't like how...
BRUNER: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...It was being made. But if you were a Democrat, you'd see something just as bad. Do you believe that's true?
BRUNER: All I can say is that I saw what I saw on the Republican side, and I never really heard anything similar that reached the level of what we were putting out. So that's really all I...
INSKEEP: In terms of election denialism or whatever.
BRUNER: Election denialism, anti-immigrant tirades, anti-democratic policies. Like, those were something that Democrats just weren't putting out.
INSKEEP: Miles Bruner, thanks so much.
BRUNER: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
INSKEEP: We reached out to Campaign Solutions, Bruner's former employer, and have yet to hear back. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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