I made my first ever last week.
The first candidate I ever donated to was Reagan. I became a card-carrying RNC and got Xmas cards from the White House every Xmas. The RNC took me for a real sucker. They started sending me questionnaires to identify the issues I was most concerned with. Then they used my responses to construct funding requests targeted to my concerns.
It took me years to get them to stop mailing me crap. But eventually they did ... until I contributed to McCain-Palin and here it came again. My contributions now go only to the candidate.