I get three or four fundraising emails every day from the Kamala Harris campaign. That strikes me as fairly normal these days.
But before Joe Biden dropped out and she entered the race, I got zero emails per day. Can anyone explain this? Obviously I was on the email lists, but the Biden team never bothered to use them. Why?
Naturally I didn't notice this when I wasn't getting emails, but in hindsight it's pretty severe campaign malpractice. Harris fixed it in a couple of days.
UPDATE: It's worth noting that other people in comments are all over the map on this. My experience might not be typical.
Really, you've just started getting them now?
I wish that ActBlue would have a big "STOP" button to click--then they'd get more money from me. The emails, texts, calls...have to stop. It's really bad if you have to leave your phone on to deal with family situations and you can expect calls from numbers not on your contact list.
This goes for every charity too.
Yes, I've tried unsubscribing (like I subscribed to this nonsense), texting "stop", etc.....doesn't seem to help with the deluge.
I did notice that making a donation to the Harris campaign immediately dumps you to their sign up to volunteer website--making it look like it's part of the donation process. I really hate those kind of games--you should not be treating your supporters as marks.
+1
They do, it's the default 'unsubscribe' link at the bottom.
Went looking for that and saw that the "recurring donation--weekly" is now checked by default for donations.
That is unacceptable.
Should note: I just got a text from someone claiming 6X match:
$10=$50.
Update: The continuing contribution box is not being automatically checked now.
It varies by candidate, in my experience. Most have the decency to default to one-time, but even on solid blue Actblue there are a few who follow trump's example and make it perpetual by default. So it's always worth being careful at that stage of checkout.
Per Rick Wilson and others who've been in this game for a long time, the matching donations thing is never real. I think that's for-sure right when it comes to PACs and those out-of-this-world 800% match things, but I'm open to some person or organization offering a legit double match for, say, an individual candidate for a low-level office, or for a relatively not-rich district or state. Of course, individual contribution limits to candidates make that kind of less likely, don't they.
Interesting... I received more donation request texts from the Biden campaign in the two weeks following the debate debacle that I did in the previous four years. I think they were desperately trying to prove that the campaign was still viable by maintaining recent levels. The cratering of donations, combined with the bad polling number, is probably what lead Biden to exit the race.
Same here. Or maybe it was about the same amount but still a lot. What’s annoying is after you donate you’re likely to get even more than before. Last time I checked unsubscribe option you could choose fewer emails
That’s my experience too mr. Drum. I was getting lots of emails and texts from the party and Elizabeth Warren (my 2020 crush) but notes from the presidential campaigns started only after Harris took over. Not sure why.
I got three emails a day from Biden until I said “send me only essential email.” Then I got two and a half emails a day until I unsubscribed completely and they did eventual stopped.
I gotten zero emails since Harris took over. My guess? You clicked the “send me email updates” box when you made a donation recently and I did not. Harris is a much better candidate than Biden in this election but it’s not because she is sending out more emails to supporters.
Them thinking that 2/3 of their messages are essential is also what caused me to do a full unsubscribe. It really seems like a missed opportunity on their part.
Three? You are so lucky! I'm getting that many in an hour sometimes, plus texts. They're really overboard.
I didn't exactly keep track, but I'm pretty sure I got about the same number of emailed requests for contributions back then as I get now.
When yahoo suddenly killed my long time email account a few years ago, I was freed from these political emails. They haven’t found my new one. Whew! Harris is advertising on TV in Michigan but trump is not.
I got a pretty constant stream of emails and so many text messages that it was making me angry.
Why not just block the text messages and redirect the emails to a separate folder?
You presume they come from a single source. They do not.
Reading the other commenst it seems people don't actually check if it is a known source.
My email client is set to show the sender and I'd never turn that off. It's too good a weeding tool. Outlook seems to make showing the sender hard to do, one of many reasons to avoid it.
that has been my experience. i had thought it was related to the fact that my wife and i had made a substantial (for us) contribution to the biden campaign as well as similarly large contributions to colin allred. we get three to four mail requests for donations each week from either biden, harris, allred, or misc. democratic organizations. most of them start with a minimum donation of $250 with some asking for a minimum of $500.
we also get daily texts from at least one of the above. it can be a bit much but i never thought badly about it, thinking that it indicated action.
Well, I would expect to get more as the election got closer, but you're right in that I have gotten a lot more since Harris took over.
I really think Biden's heart wasn't in the campaign, which is why he had to go even if part of him resisted it. I would bet he's very relieved right now.
Actually got more text messages from Joe and Jill than I am getting from Harris. I did give Biden a $100 prior to the debate, so maybe I was deemed more worthy of being begged for money.
Some other thoughts for a Sunday morning, I believe the big story last night that Il Duce calls Harris a bitch is probably in error. He calls her "that fucking bitch", with the "C" and "N" word thrown about.
No difference here, same before and after.
With regards to texts, I assume 90% of the five or so I receive each day are scams from people pretending to be the official campaign. I never reply "stop" as most of the time I get no reply. I report them as spam but it doesn't seem to help either.
Lucky you Kevin. I get at least a dozen texts a day! Like you, did not receive one from Joe bud did get some from Nancy in the past. All very interesting.
I'm getting way too many emails. The more I get, the less likely I am ever to contribute again just to avoid the nuisance of all the emails. Clearly, once you do make a contribution (as I have in moments of irrational despair or exuberance), your email address is promoted on liberal/Dem lists far and wide and the number of fundraising appeals you get increases exponentially. I know it's true since they all ask for the exact amount I actually gave (to Biden or whoever) that one time a few months ago. Awful. Like I said, all it does is make me not want to contribute to any political cause ever again.
There needs to be a law regulating fundraising requests. Emails and text messages should be restricted to once a week, phone calls and mail solicitations restricted to once a month or year. And requests to not receive any more solicitations should be required by law to be honored.
Maybe they bought more email lists from some other campaigns? There's an incredible amount of sharing/selling/swapping in that business. Three a day is pretty normal, some send more, some only send one every few days.
The trend I want to see stop is where they ask for money to be split with another candidate. The ones who do it might want to know that I'm instantly deleting them-- it's an easy decision point to keep the inbox from overflowing. Next step is deletion on sight from more candidates than I already do that with.
This is a leading exhibit in the "no good deed goes unpunished" department.
I don't quite understand the level of complaint about too many e-mails of this sort. You read the subject line in the inbox, select all fund raising / commercial e-mails and hit delete. It takes me about a minute to do that every day. Much less time than I spend washing dishes...
The answer is to set up a separate e-mail account, which is used only for donations. Check it every once in a while, otherwise don't worry about it. It's not only political campaigns that spam, it seems like it's every charitable organization including legitimate ones, as well as all sorts of businesses that you interact with on-line. And yes, they all sell their lists to other businesses and organizations.
Using a speparate email address does not actually work, unfortunately — I make all my contributions using the same email address but my other addresses have been discovered and I am solicited at all of them. I relentlessly unsubscribe, which is tedious but does keep the volume down.
The Democrats need to get this under control for the next election cycle — they are burning their fundraising base. I've largely stopped donating because I can't have people constantly texting me. When I do donate, I mail a personal check to the campaign.
My personal hack for email, which I am loath to share but here it is: I filter messages with the phrase "paid for by," which catches almost everything.
This.
You’ve all inspired me to clean out 54K unread emails from my inbox from the last 7 years. Felt good!
Well, Kevin, the real fun begins as your email works its way to the margins...
I was getting emails from both "Biden" and "Harris" before Biden dropped-out. But not nearly as many (nor even now) as I was receiving from "Trump" et al. Were I to have answered positively to those I would by now have a warehouse full of hats, mugs, and pictures. And, perhaps, ammunition. (Thus my previous comment about the email address working its way to the margins...)
I've shunted all of it off into a folder - though not the come-ons for ammunition, which I simply delete.
I was getting lots of mails from the Biden campaign. Some arrived after he'd endorsed Kamala.
slightly increased after, for me - Biden emails at 3-4 per day, now 5-6 from Kamala/Walz.
I hadn't given anything to Biden until they started pushing him out, then sent money as a sort of vote of support. Also sent money to Kamala as soon as Biden endorsed her. I've given money in response to emails, but usually that is only for down-ticket races - local school boards since the Republicans turned that into a political contest in their push to privatize education, Trisha Calvarese who is running against Boebert in our district, etc.