PublicSquare, the conservative online marketplace and parallel economy leader, launched a fundraising platform this week that challenges WinRed’s monopoly by being self-reliant and prioritizing transparency while charging lower fees through direct donations.
PSQ Impact, which is a subsidiary of the publicly traded financial technology company PublicSquare, is being headed by Alex Bruesewitz, a political strategist and adviser to President Trump. In an appearance on The Alex Marlow Show on Friday, Bruesewitz emphasized that lowering fees, leveraging technological advancements — like AI and its own payment-processing stack — and allowing voters to engage with campaigns directly, will better cater to the needs of small-dollar donors and help the Republican Party secure long-term success.
“Right after the [2024 presidential] election, instead of celebrating the victory, I actually started thinking about what the future looks like for the Republican Party. We’ll see what happens in 2028, but at the time, maybe it felt like that was going to be the last campaign where President Trump was at the top of the ticket. And that got me a little bit concerned because I know, historically, Republicans have a hard time generating small-dollar enthusiasm for anyone outside of the name ‘Donald Trump,”‘ Bruesewitz told Breitbart’s Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
“The Republican Party really needs to figure out how they can win in a post-Trump environment,” he continued. “And fortunately, we have this window here where we have already won. We have a President Donald Trump, who is effectively in the executive branch right now…and paving the way. We have a three-and-a-half-year window here to figure out what does the future look like?
“One of the easiest places I thought we could start, because of the relationship that I have with this great tech company, PublicSquare, was the payment-processing space,” he said. “That’s a concern that our donors have had for many years. They don’t know where their dollars are going when they donate to a candidate. They are frustrated with the spam that they receive. They have fatigue a lot of the times, and so what we wanted to do is, we wanted to create a platform that eased those concerns, that answered all of those questions — that lowered rates.”
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Bruesewitz said PublicSquare CEO Michael Seifert and his team of engineers got to work on PSQImpact almost immediately after the 2024 election, “working around the clock to get us that solution.”
“It’s important to me because I want the Republican Party to be successful long-term. I’m a young man. I’m 28 years old. God willing, I’m around for many more elections, but I’m very concerned about what the Republican Party looks like post-Trump unless changes are made. We’re very focused on making these changes,” he said. “I’m confident that Impact can solve the concerns that people have in the payment-processing space. And after we launch this, perhaps we can look at some of these other areas. But think the processing space is a really easy place to start.”
For pricing, Impact, which is targeted to mostly small- and medium-dollar donors, will charge a 3.5 percent flat rate for donations and 3.2 percent for donations over $500. In comparison, WinRed charges a 3.94 percent fee for donations under $500 and 3.2 percent for larger donations, according to the PAC’s pricing page. Impact will also forego the option for donors to add an additional tip to the organization, like WinRed began to do in 2023.
“We can save the party tens of millions of dollars out of the get-go, and we have a really great solution for the future,” Bruesewitz told Marlow.
WinRed, which has positioned itself as Republicans’ answer to Democrats’ Act Blue behemoth, is endorsed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and is the most dominant fundraising platform on the right. It executes through a PAC and functions as a conduit for contributions from donors to recipient federal candidates and committees. The PAC processes the donations and then handles donation data and distributes it to the relevant campaigns, according to WinRed.
On its FAQs page, it says it was “modeled after years of studying ActBlue, but it combines better technology and a partnership with Data Trust that will massively improve the party’s voter model scores, benefiting all candidates up and down the ballot.” While ActBlue has massively outraised WinRed in recent elections, WinRed has touted exponential growth since its creation in 2019.
Bruesewitz and Seifert said competition will ultimately benefit the Republican Party and could help the GOP revolutionize the space while Democrats flounder with the “total disaster” of ActBlue.
“Democrats kind of inspired this because they have ActBlue, and ActBlue is a total disaster, and perhaps… maybe they’ll be under investigation soon. They should be under investigation soon. The rumor has it that they have been laundering foreign donations through their platform. It’s a terrible situation,” Bruesewitz alleged.
“And so the Democrats are stuck with that monopoly and Republicans, on the other side, they have a monopoly with WinRed. We need competition in this space. I think competition is good in every industry, and it will lead to better results all across the board,” he added.
The Alex Marlow Show, hosted by Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow, is a weekday podcast produced by Breitbart News and Salem Podcast Network. You can subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Rumble, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
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