Dem
51
GOP
49
As a general rule, Republicans are convinced that Big Tech discriminates against them. And, in their mind, that includes the big e-mail providers, most prominently Gmail. The so-called problem is serious enough that Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) wrote an op-ed on the subject earlier this year. He declares:
A new, nonpartisan study from researchers at North Carolina State University has unmistakably exposed Big Tech's most egregious attempt to tilt the scale toward left-wing candidates. Ahead of the 2020 elections, the researchers found that Gmail, the most used email platform in the world, was a whopping seven times more likely to send conservative candidates' emails to a spam folder than it was to send left-wing candidates' emails to that unwanted destination.
By making it more difficult for right-of-center candidates to convey their message to voters, Gmail's political bias dramatically hurt Republican candidates while benefiting their Democrat counterparts. This is unacceptable.
Daines and 20 of his closest Republican friends in the Senate have even introduced a bill, the Political Bias In Algorithm Sorting Emails Act of 2022, or Political BIAS Emails Act of 2022, to address the problem. It is interesting how selective the GOP's support for laissez-faire economics seems to be.
A pair of Republicans, namely Erick Erickson (writing for his own blog) and Corbin Barthold (writing for The Bulwark), have taken a look at the problem and reached the same basic conclusion: The Republicans' problems are actually their own fault.
To start—although this has little to do with the spam filtering—the Republicans are pretty terrible at e-mail marketing. Both parties abuse e-mail (and thus their supporters), but the GOP takes things to extremes. Republican operatives send a much greater volume of e-mail than their counterparts. The red team is more likely to send marketing messages to people who did not sign up for them, and is less respectful of unsubscribe requests. Further, Republican e-mail pitches tend to be much more over-the-top, both in terms of verbiage about "the enemy," but also in terms of claims about the benefits of donating. Barthold, for example, highlights an e-mail that claims that recipients had "ONE HOUR" to send money that would produce a "3400% IMPACT INCREASE." He wonders, as do we, exactly what a "3400% IMPACT INCREASE" is, and why it's not a 3300% IMPACT INCREASE or a 3500% IMPACT INCREASE. Finally, Republicans are more likely to engage in shenanigans, like automatically signing people up for recurrent donations.
These things don't have much to do with the very real fact that Republican e-mails are much more likely to be filtered as spam than Democratic e-mails. That's not to say there is zero impact; frequency of e-mails is a trigger for spam filters. Further, if people feel harassed, and they don't see a better way to close the spigot, they might "teach" their mail client that messages from, say gop.com are spam.
However, the primary source of the Republicans' spam problem is that, on the whole, they practice terrible e-mail hygiene. E-mail frequency is actually a part of that, so is sending multiple copies of the same e-mail to the same person (which will happen when commingling various e-mail lists). It's also a problem to send an e-mail to too many recipients at the same time. Further, some campaigns (ahem, Marco Rubio) did not properly configure their e-mail accounts for proper authentication (in other words, the receiving servers could not confirm that the e-mails came from the source that the e-mails claimed to be from). Including too many images, as Republican campaigns are wont to do, is another red flag for spam filters.
Democrats, on the whole, tend to be more tech savvy when it comes to campaigning. For example, they got ActBlue up, and running, and raking in the money, much earlier than the Republicans were able to get WinRed operating. And the blue team's tech skill extends to fundraising e-mails; they may use some of the same sleazy marketing tricks, but they don't use them as often, and they are careful to avoid the various e-mail hygiene issues that the Republicans have yet to fully grasp.
There are two lessons here. The first is that the GOP hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing about how unfair Facebook/Gmail/Snapchat/etc. are to right-wingers may well be a bunch of hot air and ignorance. The second is that whether or not there's any substance, the carping works very well. Sensitive to attacks from the right, and fearful of legislation or other oversight, Gmail has loosened its spam filters for political e-mails in general and for Republican e-mails in particular. So, the next time you have a chance at a 3400% IMPACT INCREASE, you will likely know about it without having to look in the spam filter. (Z)