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The politics of your email inbox.
“Unicorn farts.”
“They wouldn’t want me to say this.”
“These two are driving me NUTS.”
“I’ll say what I damn well please.”
If you’re thinking these sentences read like email subject lines penned by U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, you’re correct. These are actual subject lines from fundraising appeals made by Kennedy’s campaign in recent weeks, more times than not personally signed by the senator himself.
Like his counterparts in the U.S. Senate, Kennedy relies heavily on email communications for fundraising. His campaign sends two to three email appeals to prospective donors daily, each as outlandish and eye-catching as the other.
The emails produce a tone that matches Kennedy’s folksy, say-anything brand and style of public rhetoric, according to Joshua Darr, a political science professor at Louisiana State University who specializes in campaign strategy.
“We know email subject lines are A/B tested within an inch of their lives,” Darr said. “There’s one goal: to get people to open the emails. I have a hard time believing these subject lines aren’t being tested. If Sen. Kennedy is bringing us ‘unicorn farts,’ that’s because it tested better than something else.”
The actual bodies of Sen. Kennedy’s emails have probably been honed and analyzed as well. The content certainly teeters on that fine line between fact and fiction, especially when it comes to the senator’s own fundraising.
In the real world, Kennedy is shattering all fundraising records for an incumbent Louisiana senator. In the digital universe that exists in his email narratives, he’s “outraised and outnumbered” and constantly missing fundraising goals.
This was the fundraising report Kennedy offered his supporters last week: “I’m not feeling great at the moment because my team just informed me that I missed my July end-of-month goal, and my Socialist opponents are continuing to gain momentum.”
Asked about the pace of incoming dollars, a Kennedy campaign spokesperson said, in fact, “fundraising is holding steady.”
So what gives? To obtain their own answers, a group of Princeton University researchers reviewed more than 100,000 political emails in 2020. The conclusion won’t surprise you — when it comes to these political emails, “manipulative tactics are the norm, not the exception,” according to the study.
“It’s not like the recipients of these emails are going to run on over to FEC.gov to see who’s winning and losing,” Darr added.
The same study also touched on one of Kennedy’s repeated tactics, which involves promising donors their contributions will be matched. In an email sent to potential donors last week, Kennedy boasted of a “1,000% match” for any contributions, but offered little more in the way of details.
In their review of 100,000 emails, Princeton researchers found “about 13,000 emails promised donation ‘matching,’ usually by unspecified entities. Legal experts point out that although matching by wealthy individuals is common in philanthropy, it would be unlawful for political campaigns due to Federal Election Commission individual contribution limits.”
On the other hand, if you look deeper into Kennedy’s claims of weakened fundraising, you’ll find a grain of truth. Online fundraising, particularly small-dollar donations, have slowed to an alarming rate for Republican incumbents across the board. The New York Times reported recently the “total amount donated online fell by more than 12 percent across all federal Republican campaigns and committees in the second quarter compared with the first quarter…”
Small-dollar, online donations to Democrats, by comparison, are surging — “by $100 million from the last quarter of 2021 to the most recent three-month period.”
Ben Riggs, the campaign manager for former fighter pilot Luke Mixon, one of Kennedy’s Democratic opponents, described these kinds of donations as “the life-blood of our campaign.” He also said finance reports would show an uptick. “We’ve invested heavily in digital fundraising and built a strong online operation,” said Riggs, “with donations averaging $28 and increasing by 85 percent between Q4 to Q1 and 104 percent between Q1 and Q2.”
Kennedy will likely want to share those statistics with his supporters, but he may not mentioned that Mixon has raised just $1.1 million to his $29 million.
For now, Kennedy is pulling some new email tricks out of his campaign bag. Over the past week or so, Kennedy has transitioned to a raffle-type approach that offers “the first five donors” an opportunity to win autographed photos and t-shirts.
There’s also a mug up for grabs that has Kennedy’s head on it, with the word “HONEST” emblazoned underneath.
‘News of the Day’ content, as reported by public domain newswires.
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