At some point in the not-so-distant past, my personal email address somehow ended up in a mailing list maintained by the US Democratic Party.
To be clear, I did not sign myself up with them. And while I have a suspicion as to how my name was hoovered by the Democrats, I can’t prove it. Occassionally I get emails from people who don’t quite know their own email addresses because they’ve used mine for something important like registering with a medical practitioner. I’m certainly not sophisticated enough to have unique email addresses for every place I sign up to enable me to track email addresses.
They’re using my Gmail address, except not quite in the form that I use it. I have a dot in mine, but Gmail actually ignores those, so firstname.surname@gmail.com is treated the same as firstnamesurname@gmail.com in Gmail.
And to be honest, I could probably have stopped the emails in their tracks, but I found it interesting to see what kind of volume of emails would come through. So I created a filter that kept the emails clear from Inbox and they just drop-in.
Here’s a chart showing how the emails flow.
Biden dropped out as the Democratic Presidential candidate on Sunday 21 July, and on that day I was sent three emails. Only by the third email had news filtered through about this withdrawal, and it was in the form of a letter from Biden saying in summary what he said publicly that day, and supporting Harris as his candidate.
Trump was shot at during a rally on Saturday 13 July. Sunday 14 July was the only day that I received no emails from the Biden or Harris campaigns. Then, the first email the following day was a signed note from Biden entitled “We cannot lose sight of who we are.” It did not actively ask for donations, but did include a link to sign up with the campaign.
Some of the other things I spotted and some general notes:
- I have been getting an average of 4.7 emails every day since 25 April 2024 when they started coming through.
- The Democratic Party loves to use a celebrity – Robert De Niro has emailed me four times, and Carole King seven times. Earlier in the campaign Julia Roberts and George Clooney were mentioned frequently. I’m not sure how I appear demographically on the Democratic database, but my suspicion is older rather than younger given the celebrity names I see in emails. Are others getting younger celebrity endorsements?
- The most emails I received on a single day was 10 on 28 June. That happened to be the day after the Biden/Trump debate on CNN – which most commentators would say had been pretty disastrous for Biden.
- Whilst I get multiple emails on any given day, the sender of each email tends to change to keep things fresh. For example, on Saturday 10 August I was sent eight emails, but they were from, in turn: Harris for President, Harris-Walz 2024, Kamala Harris, Team Harris, Harris-Walz Campaign, Kamala Harris, Harris for President, Team Harris, and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
- Basically, nearly every email wants me to donate money to the Democratic cause – sometimes with very urgent calls to action. (I would note to readers, that I am a British citizen, living in the UK, with no right to vote in the US election.)
- The commonest amount of money they’re asking for is $25, but occasionally they ask for as little as $5. Buttons at the foot of emails have quick links to give $25, $50, $100, $250, $500 or “other” amounts.
- “Our records show…” is a commonly used subject line to remind me that I’ve not donated.
- I had two emails “from” Tim Walz, and another welcoming him arrive in my inbox before I received an email “announcing” who Harris’ running mate would be. It’s all in the timing.
- I’ve never had a donation begging letter from any UK political party (although I do seem to be on the mailing list of one party without ever actively signing up).
Now it’s worth noting that I mostly don’t open the emails, and tracking pixels within the emails may well spot that behaviour. I mostly just mark the emails as “read” in Gmail. Consequently, I may be getting more emails from the campaign as a consequence.
As far as I know, I’m only getting national campaign emails. I’m not receiving emails targeting me to donate to local or State elections. I suspect that some of these campaigns, particularly in closely fought areas, also send a lot of email out.
All timings are also based on UK time. So if an email comes in at 23:59 BST (or GMT) it goes into that day, but 00:01 BST (which is 19:01 EST) is counted as the following day. That’s relevant when emails are coming at a rate of knots because a deadline of some sort is approaching.
Yes – I could unsubscribe I guess. But I find it interesting to see how things work. There’s probably a whole load of natural language processing work to be done examining tone and sentiment of the emails being sent. Are they desperate? Threatening? Triumphant?
Maybe I’ll get to some of this at a later date.
Image at the top generated by Adobe AI with the prompt: “a donkey sitting in a campaign office at a laptop sending lots of emails with American flags in the background”