The Democratic Party is masterful at cultivating its largest donors and raising millions of dollars from them. “The term is bundler,” former Democratic National Finance Committee member Lindy Li told Public, and a bundler is “Somebody who raises millions of dollars.” Li said she raised “tens of millions” for Democrats on top of the Philadelphia real estate her family donated as office space, including “Barack Obama’s first South Philadelphia campaign office.” The party recruited her, she said, by sending a member of the National Finance Committee to her home, and it kept her with access, since she “was routinely at the White House, maybe every three weeks or so” and “was invited to the Oval Office.” Membership on the committee is secret and conditional, Li said, with a floor of about $100,000 a year and members “kicked off” if they miss their targets, while “people like me, we raise like millions of dollars a year.” Nearly a third of Biden’s early ambassador nominees were campaign bundlers. Li writes in her riveting new book, Unburdened, that she “spotted two photos of myself from past events proudly gracing the West Wing walls” when she visited the Oval Office on February 24, 2024. “The more money you raised,” she writes, “the more luminous the smiles, the faster the text replies, the more obsequious the staff, and the closer you stood to Kamala herself.”
But donors who leave the party, or even question it, can expect its leaders to attack them personally. “Jamie Harrison bullied me almost on a daily basis at the end of 2024,” Li said of the man who chaired the Democratic National Committee until February 2025, adding, “The tweets are still up.” In December 2024, Harrison posted that “Narcissism incarnate has truly found a home & an audience,” accused her of giving “herself all of these elaborate DNC titles,” and closed, “Go get that contributor contract, Lindy.” Li said she took her parents to “The Nutcracker on Christmas Eve, read another attack from the chairman on her phone, and thought, “God, you can’t even leave me alone on Christmas Eve?” In February 2025, Harrison posted screenshots of her private messages praising his “incredible leadership” and wrote, “Grifters going to grift,” and, “You are a fraud.”
“He exposed our personal private correspondence,” Li said, and “He lied about me, defamed me.” Others went further, Li told Piers Morgan in December 2024, when she said, “People have called me a whore, the ‘C-word.’”
