Remembering the Time Samantha Bee Tried to Steer $50,000 to Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign but It Didn’t Work

An extremely late-2010s tale

Elizabeth Warren is in the discourse, so now seems like a good time to remember the time that Samantha Bee tried to funnel $50,000 to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign but the plan fell apart in a kind of hilarious way.

In 2019, Daily Show alumnus Samantha Bee had a political comedy show on TBS called Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. The show was tied at the hip to where I worked at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and not just because both hosts had started at The Daily Show; the two shows shared some staff (the script guy, some graphics people) and even a studio. Yes, that’s right: The studio that all of America saw when they faithfully tuned in to Full Frontal with Samantha Bee every Wednesday was the same one they saw when they watched John Oliver on Sunday. And in between, it was used for TNT’s Inside the NBA. Which is why I once saw Charles Barkley in the hall, said “Hey, Charles!” and he waved and said “Good morning!” It was 4PM.

I might be the world’s foremost archivist on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Remember in Roots, when Alex Haley finds the old guy in the African village who has his family’s lineage committed to memory? That’s me with “Full Fronts”, as I call it. The show helped me wake up to the fact that something had gone terribly wrong in the world of late night political comedy. By the late 2010s, I was having serious misgivings about the quality of work we were doing on John Oliver; the less-than-fully-truthful moments had piled up, and I was starting to wonder whether we were the good guys. Full Fronts helped snap my vision into focus because it made it clear that these shows could and perhaps inevitably would become the left-wing version of Fox News.

If Full Fronts was on today, it might be called BlueSky TV. It made wine-influenced Facebook posts from your aunt seem like The Economist. Less than a decade later, the show already seems like an artifact from a distant time; in much the same way that an archeologist might look at a pottery shard and instantly date it to ancient Assyria, a comedian can look at a piece shaming the mainstream media for insufficiently calling out racism and know that it came from 2018. The show fascinated me, I watched every episode, and that’s how I became the keeper of the story that I’m now telling even though it really doesn’t involve me at all.

In the runup to the 2020 Democratic primary, Full Fronts released an app that attempted to “gamify” the primary. It worked like this: Participants would join their favorite candidate’s “team” and complete “challenges” — i.e. answer trivia questions — to earn their candidate “points”. Participants were also encouraged to donate to a Full Frontal-controlled political action committee, and before the Iowa caucus, proceeds from that fund would be donated to the candidate with the most points. You may be wondering: Why would anyone do this instead of just donating to their preferred candidate? That was not initially clear. Nor has it become clear in subsequent years, nor will it ever become clear because the whole thing is just a goofy idea.

The app was quite obviously an attempt to steer money to the Elizabeth Warren campaign. Full Frontal was the most Elizabeth Warren-y show possible — it mixed bluestocking progressivism with undiluted 2010s girlbossery. The Venn diagram of Elizabeth Warren diehards and Full Frontal viewers probably looked like this:

I’m sure that the Full Fronts team would say that the app was not an attempt to steer money to the Warren campaign. And to that I say: bullshit. Come the fuck on…what am I, a toddler? You didn’t have to be some ultra-savvy Beltway insider to see through the pretense — the ruse was about as subtle as snuff porn. Here’s a clip from the rollout — do you notice any deftly-placed subliminal messages when Sam says “play for your favorite candidate”?

I let that clip play through to the Joe Biden joke to give you a sense of the deep blue bubble in which this effort existed: In the world of these writers, Joe Biden — who would go on to win 52 percent of the vote in a divided field — was resoundingly, even comically unpopular. I’d also like to inform you that when Biden won the nomination and chose Harris as his VP, the show’s take became “It’s awkward that she’s the VP because everyone likes Harris so much more than Biden!” This show really does need to be studied; I think that all the historians who analyze the fall of Rome to the nth degree should turn their attention to late 2010s progressivism, because we truly do need to figure out what the hell happened there.

At first — unsurprisingly — Warren took the lead. And yes, I was on the app, as part of Team John Delaney so as to not contaminate the results. But soon, another candidate began to surge: Andrew Yang. This was odd because Yang was the libertarian-leaning candidate in what ended up being The Primary Of A Million Purity Tests. It was also odd because the Yang campaign never caught fire — he hovered around two percent in the polls and ended up with a vote total that made Michael Bloomberg look like FDR. But here was tech sector darling Yang succeeding on an app made by a show that appealed to the Warren/Lina Kahn/Kara Swisher wing of the Democratic Party. What was that about?

What that was about was that the tech-savvy “Yang Gang” — which I believe was an offshoot of The Crips — realized that they could game the game. They got on Reddit and social media — or maybe I should say “they stayed on Reddit and social media, like always,” because that was an extremely online cohort — and encouraged people to play the game. Pretty soon, it looked like Yang might win, even despite Bee’s not-so-subtle plea for Warren fans to get on the app and facilitate the grift:

If anyone is tempted to argue that Bee wasn’t simply trying to give money to Warren, I will point to this clip and note that Bee says “overtaken by Andrew Yang” with the tone of voice that one might use to say “lodged sideways in my rectum” or “eaten alive by razorback crabs”.

The Yang campaign won the money, which turned out to be $50,000. Bee barely mentioned it on her show — having talked up the app in longform “A-segments” for months, she devoted literally one minute at the end of an episode to announcing Yang as the winner. And then she went on Colbert and didn’t mention it at all. And then Yang dropped out almost immediately afterwards. Which is fucking awesome — I have mixed feelings about Andrew Yang, but that’s a move that I’ll happily mark in the “baller” column.¹ I hope that he took the money and bought a $50,000 pair of leather pants, or blew 50 grand playing Street Fighter at a nickel arcade, because the thing was a farce to begin with, so it might as well remain a farce all the way to the end.

And there’s a funny coda here: I was on Andrew Yang’s podcast three years after the fact, and I asked him about the whole thing. And it took more than a little prompting for him to even remember that his campaign had received the money:

If there’s a lesson here — and there might not be, but let’s all pretend — it’s that the stunts on political comedy shows are just that: publicity stunts. They’re often ill-conceived and pointless. In 2011, The Colbert Report got a lot of attention for creating a Super PAC, and in subsequent years, the late night comedy world kept trying to re-run that play. We got a ton of free publicity in the early days of John Oliver from articles pushing the narrative that we weren’t just a TV show — we were actually changing things. In hindsight, of course, it’s clear that we were not changing things — we were just a TV show. And TV shows have an incentive to do things that get Wired and The Hollywood Reporter write articles about them even if the thing they do is dumber than a condom full of rocks.

$50,000 would not have saved the Warren campaign. Though she was the third-from-last serious² candidate to drop out, Warren got just 7.7 percent of the vote and won zero contests. And on a dark day in 2022, TBS pulled the plug on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. So, these events are quickly fading into the grey haze of history; I’m glad I could share them with you before they’re forgotten entirely. And, if someday you happen take a canoe up-river to my village, and find my hut, and ply me with sweet fruits and cooked yams, maybe — just maybe — I will regale you with more gems from the oral tradition of the show now known only as Full Fronts.

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1. I’m being a bit glib in my characterization: Yang dropped out because he didn’t win Iowa or New Hampshire. So the fault lies with the app, not Yang, because there was always the possibility that they’d give money to a campaign when it was functionally too late.

2. The word “serious” in is this sentence because of Tulsi Gabbard, the very definition of an unserious candidate.