Why Are Political Candidates Emailing Like Ex-Boyfriends and Car Salesmen?

Intimate greetings and overfamiliarity have become hallmarks of campaign-donation emails.

The text, sent from an unknown number, prompted a jump scare when I saw it as an iMessage preview: “About last night …” The night before: Hadn’t I been at yoga? When I clicked on the message, I was relieved and then annoyed by the next words: “—Jon Ossoff,” under an image of the senator from Georgia staring into the middle distance, handsomely. “Last night I took the stage to debate my MAGA extremist opponent Mike Collins,” “Ossoff” went on to tell me. The text message continued over the course of several paragraphs and ended, as these missives tend to, with an ask for cash.

Politicians in both parties now text and email in ways that make them sound like pleading ex-boyfriends, stern but loving baseball coaches, and representatives from a rental-car company trying to sell me on their loyalty program. Intimate greetings and overfamiliarity have become hallmarks of political groveling, as perennial as yard signs and far more omnipresent. Some recent text messages I have received: “Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?” and, “from” Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, “UPGRADE For: Sophie You’ve been tapped for MAGA Gold Status!” All of this despite the fact that I have donated exactly $0 to political candidates this midterm-election cycle.

The text-and-email-blitzing strategy is not new, but the frequency of these messages has been rising over the past decade. The Scoop’s Political Email Archive, a database that compiles campaign-fundraising emails, shows a sharp spike in political emails in the past six years. The open-source archive, created by the journalist and developer Derek Willis, collected 22,097 fundraising emails in 2020 and 135,153 in the next midterm year, 2022. This year, so far, it has archived 106,713. That’s exactly the number of emails and texts it feels like I, personally, have received that say some version of: Sophie please please you’ve impressed me it’s an EMERGENCY give me money please.

These messages are not unlike the happy-birthday emails you might get from a makeup brand, employing a personal touch so you’ll click and consider buying yourself a little present. “People’s favorite word is their own name,” Marty Santalucia, a Democratic fundraiser and partner in Vector Political, a political-technology firm, told me. He said the “rule of thumb is that more personalization is better.” Any fundraising communication has a minuscule click-through rate, and an even smaller donation yield, so every possible boost matters to campaigns.

But the resulting experience for voters and would-be voters is strange: We’re now on the receiving end of a glut of so many similar messages that personalization loses its luster. We’re being made to feel like the Josh Shapiros and Ted Cruzes and Mary Peltolas of the world are all personally reaching out to us, while knowing simultaneously that they’re obviously not. Anyone who has ever given a dollar to a campaign anywhere is probably getting these texts. We live in a world in which our name, email, and phone number are continually bought and sold as data; this is why, despite living in New York and possessing a San Francisco area code, I’m getting messages from Tennessee and Texas.

Within this crowded landscape, campaigns and organizations working on politicians’ behalf have employed more and more creative—and bizarre—attempts to get your attention. Some eschew political language altogether in subject lines, adopting folksy shorthand: “How’s that workin’ out for ya?” Sheri Biggs, a Republican representative from South Carolina, emailed her list. Some seem to be borrowing the online slang of influencers and podcasters, or at least trying to. Last week, the fundraising team for Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, sent an email whose subject line was simply: “woah.” A survey of The Scoop’s archive of emails doesn’t reveal major overarching differences between the two parties’ approaches to email and text: For both Democrats and Republicans, it is the most important election ever, and you need to give money to them right this second.

These communications occasionally have the whiff of phishing attempts. When you get a text that begins “Its James Talarico” you might wonder: Is someone trying to steal my credit-card number? (Despite the grammatical error, this donation link to Democratic PAC ActBlue does appear to be genuine—though it’s not a direct message from his campaign, as many of these emails and texts are not.) In their attempts to dazzle you, some missives employ bright colors and random capitalization, giving them the frenzied, scammy quality of chain emails from the AOL era. An email from ActBlue, its text tinted light blue, said:

Hi—we’re so sorry … this is such a hard email to write. We texted. We emailed. We begged. We’ve been warning you for MONTHS that Trump is trying to DESTROY ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform. Because Democrats just aren’t stepping up like we hoped. Trump’s House Majority is on the brink of collapse so he’s attacking ActBlue to steal the upcoming elections. It reeks of desperation, but if we don’t step up now, Donald Trump will win. We’re on our KNEES pleading with you to rush just $5 (200% -MATCHED) to elect a WAVE of Democrats, flip the House, and STOP Trump’s agenda. Chip in $5 to BOLD Democrats NOW>>

What? For me, this trumped-up urgency has the opposite of its intended effect. I don’t like the sensation of being tricked, the bait and switch of opening a text I thought was from someone I knew only to find out it’s Fake Bill Hagerty; at a time when only 17 percent of the U.S. population trusts politicians, according to a Pew Research Center survey, this sort of ruse is certainly not helping. The endless stream of messages telling me the election is an emergency makes me feel, paradoxically, numb. There may be a lot at stake, but the more politicians text me “EMERGENCY,” while telling me I’m special, the less it will seem like one.

Some people may very well want to build a parasocial relationship with candidates. They might want to hear a personal message from Talarico’s mom, as I did this week, just as they might want to watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s egg-freezing journey, or hear about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s diet. In this way, political superfans can feel like they’re having a metaphorical beer with the candidate, even if they’re only watching them drink one on-screen.

Perhaps that’s the direction in which things are headed: toward greater and more precise personalization, with the help of artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, Santalucia and Vector Political launched a new AI-assisted texting platform that works with Democratic campaigns and causes. What Vector Political calls its “engine” goes further than personalization, by generating digital assistants that will text you back instantly. The platform has sent more than 3 million texts so far in this election cycle; Santalucia claims it has higher click-through and donation rates than traditional one-way texting. If what you dream of is fewer texts from Jon Ossoff, all of this is not a great sign for 2028.

Santalucia put me on the list of one of their clients—an advocacy group for court integrity—so I could see how it worked. The AI introduced itself as a digital assistant and asked me, in part: “We would rather hear it from you than guess: if you could tell the people fighting to restore the integrity of the courts one thing right now, what would it be?”

I texted back that I was actually a journalist writing about the phenomenon of political texting. After trying to gently steer me back to the subject of the courts, it asked me what I had noticed.

“Well,” I wrote, feeling as silly as I always do when I address LLMs as though they’re people. “A lot of texts from someone like Jon Ossoff seem overly personal even though I know they’re automated. Have you noticed that?”

“That’s a fair observation,” it told me. “Striking that balance is genuinely tricky. Thanks for sharing what you’re working on, Sophie.”

That last line reminded me of exactly how it feels to be addressed by everyone this election cycle—the dropping of my name, the automated attempt to reach me in particular but really everyone in general. I had to think: You’ve really outdone yourselves, candidates.