{"id":12493,"date":"2025-08-21T14:32:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T14:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/if-you-suddenly-got-added-to-jaime-harrisons-substack-youre-not-alone\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T14:32:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T14:32:14","slug":"if-you-suddenly-got-added-to-jaime-harrisons-substack-youre-not-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/if-you-suddenly-got-added-to-jaime-harrisons-substack-youre-not-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"If you suddenly got added to Jaime Harrison\u2019s Substack, you\u2019re not alone"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison is jumping on the Substack trend, but he seems to have overlooked the fine print.<\/p>\n

Harrison appears to have run afoul of Substack\u2019s terms of service by mass-subscribing his former campaign email list and other personal contacts. Substack\u2019s rules say<\/a>: \u201cDon\u2019t add people to your mailing list without their consent, and don\u2019t import your contacts list or social graphs.\u201d And Substack emphasizes that subscribers should have \u201cexplicitly opted in,\u201d according to a Substack spokesperson.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cAs a past member of my email list, you have been automatically subscribed to my new hub on Substack.\u201d Harrison has a Substack podcast where he\u2019s interviewed Democrats including Hunter Biden<\/a>, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore<\/a> and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz<\/a>, and he also started a paid subscription section for superfans to get early access to podcasts and bonus content.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, \u201cThe horrors of giving my email to Democrats never cease. Why tf did I get auto-subscribed to Jaime Harrison\u2019s Substack,\u201d while another wrote<\/a>, \u201cJust found out I was automatically subscribed to Jaime Harrison\u2019s Substack without my knowledge or consent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spokesperson for Substack, granted anonymity to speak freely, declined to comment on Harrison\u2019s case but said the company\u2019s guidelines \u201crequire that any mailing list a publisher imports be made up of people who have explicitly opted in to receive emails from that publication\u201d and that lists purchased or collected without consent (which frequently happens on campaigns) are not permitted. The spokesperson bolded the phrase \u201cexplicitly opted in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spokesperson said Substack runs basic checks for issues including invalid addresses but that it doesn\u2019t have a way to verify how emails were collected.<\/p>\n

Harrison said in a brief phone interview that he \u201cassumed\u201d his team had followed Substack\u2019s rules but added, \u201cFor me, knowing email stuff and all that other stuff, I don\u2019t follow this stuff.\u201d In a follow-up text message, he said he had abided by all Substack policies and that his team \u201cworked directly with Substack to upload our list, which was collected from my Senate campaign and other personal activities.\u201d A spokesperson for Harrison declined to give Blue Light News the name of the Substack representative they dealt with and said such interactions were done only over the phone.<\/p>\n

Several other Democratic politicians with Substacks have chosen different ways to build up their newsletter lists. A person familiar with Pete Buttigieg\u2019s Substack, granted anonymity to discuss the matter, said the former transportation secretary is only using organic ways to grow his Substack<\/a>, which has around 600,000 followers, and that his team doesn\u2019t pull any lists over.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he\u2019s also grown his Substack<\/a> organically and didn\u2019t 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<\/a> and Jennifer Rubin<\/a>, as well as journalist Anand Giridharadas<\/a>, have been very helpful in adding new subscribers, now totaling more than 65,000.<\/p>\n

Last week, Harrison\u2019s Substack showed that he had a million subscribers, but most of Harrison\u2019s posts have less than a dozen likes. After Blue Light News started asking questions, the number of subscribers became private. A Harrison spokesperson declined to comment on why the subscription number is no longer public.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and annoy \u2014 people in their orbit.<\/p>\n

\u201cSubstack prohibits unsolicited spam for a reason,\u201d said Josh Nelson, CEO of progressive ad platform Civic Shout. \u201cJaime Harrison, as a former DNC chair, should know better than to add people to an email list without their knowledge or consent.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cretirement plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so dumb because obviously there\u2019s 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,\u201d the consultant said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s terms of service by mass-subscribing his former campaign email list and other personal contacts. Substack\u2019s rules say: \u201cDon\u2019t add people to your mailing list without their consent, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}