Member Newsletter
I wanted to update you on the mailers story I discussed with you yesterday. Before getting to the details, I want to thank everyone who sent in reports. Really, really helpful. In fact, what I’m doing would be completely impossible without them. I’m going to assume you read yesterday’s post, which has various caveats and context. If not, you can read it here.
- First, there are a lot of people talking about this independently in different swing states. Like, it’s really a thing. I was listening in on a Zoom call yesterday about a state legislative race in North Carolina and the topic actually came up — how we’re all getting spammed by these Trump mailers. And to be clear, this was a call where everyone was either a party official or a partisan Democrat or actually a candidate. From this and other discussions with TPM readers it’s clear this is being discussed as a minor mystery among Democrats in each swing state but with everyone thinking that it’s just their town or state and not something that’s happening in all the swing states.
- One additional point that’s worth making explicit: these are clearly persuasion mailers (albeit reaching many non-persuadable recipients) as opposed to base-turnout mailers. They’re clearly aimed at on-the-fence voters. So, for instance, one of the most common ones is a very protesting-too-much piece saying Trump has nothing to do with Project 2025. Another says Harris is going to destroy Social Security and Medicare. (This is backfilled with claims about inflation eating away at benefits and letting “illegals” have all the money.) These clearly aren’t meant for the MAGA faithful.
- That gets us to another point worth making explicit: There are a handful of identical mailers being sent in all the swing states, in each case from the state GOPs, or, in the case of Pennsylvania, an affiliated committee. Just this morning TPM Reader JM flagged something to me I hadn’t heard before. His mailings from the Wisconsin GOP are sent from Jacksonville, Florida. There’s nothing odd about it being mailed from another state. But I get the sense that this may be where all of these are being mailed from. So if you have some of these mailers and haven’t thrown them away yet, take a look at whether it’s from your state Republican Party. If it is, look for this little box called the “nonprofit indicia” which lists the zip code of origin. Let me know if it’s this zip code or a different one. It’s possible that JM is an outlier here because he’s from a part of rural Wisconsin — that is a bit different from the mold of spamming areas where everyone’s a Democrat. But again, it’s pretty much all the same mailers, all sent from the state parties of the respective states, and with a similar profile of recipients. So it would make perfect sense if they’re all being sent from the same place. Can you check?
- JM’s note had another detail I’ve been noticing. He said the state GOP mailers were all addressed to his college-age daughter. And they tend to be abortion related. A number of emailers have had similar stories. They’re getting deluged, but most or all of the mailers are addressed to a college-age or young-adult child. It’s certainly not universal. But it’s enough to have gotten my attention.
- Meanwhile, let’s go back to that Zoom call about the state legislative race in North Carolina. A political consultant on that call said that his impression was that these mailers were targeting men under 45. And his theory was that whoever is sending them sees men under 45 as a sleeper pro-Trump constituency that is going under the radar, much as white working class voters did in 2016. I don’t think any of this invalidates the pretty clear fact that tons of these are going to partisan Democrats who aren’t remotely persuadable. But there are enough hints here that I think you can see at least the outlines of an intended target group: young or relatively young, unpoliticized people who need some reassurance that Trump isn’t actually that bad. Possibly with a particular focus on young men.
- Some readers speculate that this is actually a vote-caging operation. We heard a lot about this around the turn of the century. This is when Republicans send postcards to addresses on a voter roll. And then ones that come back undeliverable are added to a list to be stricken from voter rolls or challenged at the polls. I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Those efforts just look totally different. You don’t send out pricey, card stock mailers for that and you certainly don’t send dozens of them. That’s a huge waste of money. Again, just not how it’s done. More specifically, I think those are done using first class mail because that’s how you get the undeliverable notification. And that’s the whole point. But these are all going using discount non-profit bulk rates. So I don’t think you get the return service. If anyone knows to the contrary let me know. But I’m pretty confident that’s not what this is about.
- One of the most interesting responses I got was from TPM Reader JS who is a former local Democratic Party leader in Philly. He doesn’t see the strategy as surprising or a bad strategy. It’s really just working the percentages. Here’s a portion of his note.
First, for any mailing or door hanging operation, there is a cost per piece which goes up the more targeted the list is. In my area, approximately 70% are Dems, and the break even point was usually about 80%. So we’d hit a little over half of all households normally. If we had even a little extra money, we’d skip cutting the list and just do 100%, including non-Dems, because it just wasn’t worth the trouble to break up the list.
Second, my particular area, which has been especially transient in the last 8 years, appears on paper to have a large number of Trump-Biden voters. However, it’s actually more nuanced than that. We had Trump voters move out and Biden voters move in. So the”flaw” here is that the PACs are trying to reach what they believe to be Trump-Biden voters, but they are actually reaching brand new Clinton-Biden neighbors. That is very difficult to pull from the data since you obviously can’t tell who pulled the lever in the voting booth.
Finally, being an area that is 70% Dem in a city that is 85% Dem, it’s a sound strategy to work the center. My organization would routinely work the 30% non-Dems – turnout on the Dem side was already extremely high and sometimes the easiest gains were conversions. The same applies this election – in the 70% of the neighborhood registered Dem, there are plenty of defectors. It comes down to how much you have to spend, and how many votes you think you pick up. Does a dollar spent in Philadelphia move more votes than a dollar in Butler county? It’s always hard to say, but at the moment the Harris campaign hasn’t pumped much of anything into the local Philadelphia party so the only literature we’re getting is this GOP garbage – with 40yo stock photos of $20 bills – remember those old $20s?
- The point, as far as it goes, is pretty straightforward and persuasive. There aren’t that many gettable voters. And how many recipients laugh at your mailers doesn’t matter. It’s all down to a calculus of the relative cost of efficiency of targeting and wasted mailers. I think this is at least important context. But I’m uncertain it’s the whole story. And, as JS notes, it can be a reasonable strategy poorly executed. One part of this is that the best rates are when you send to a whole mail delivery tract. But those come to “postal customer” or something like that. That’s why I asked if people’s mailers contained their names. And all of them do. So I think a significant amount of this is sending to mailing lists that contain a ton of not remotely persuadable Democratic partisans. But to return to JS’s overall point about odds and percentages, it really comes down to money. If your funding is infinite, you can afford quite a lot of inefficiency.
Do keep sending me your reports. Again, is it addressed to you or a member of your family? What entity is sending it? Look at that nonprofit indicia mark and see where it was sent from, what city or zip. And send me pictures. It’s helpful if I can see the actual mailers.