Report from Campaigns & Elections
In Brief – Google has put in place a Gmail policy that will make it somewhat easier for political campaigns and committees to reach personal Gmail inboxes by allowing eligible political entities to become “verified senders,” bypassing some spam filtering for policy-compliant, non-abusive messages. The program requires participants to maintain a spam complaint rate below 0.3 percent over 14 days. Although the Google policy announcement does not mention the GOP, Republicans have complained for years that Gmail unfairly filtered conservative fundraising emails. Under the new policy, verified political senders must be registered with federal, state or local election authorities, use one verified address per campaign domain, and undergo identity and background checks through Campaign Verify. Republicans welcomed the change as overdue and a potential remedy for perceived disadvantages in digital fundraising. Some Democrats warned it could enable deceptive fundraising and unsolicited messages, arguing political campaigns should follow the same anti-spam standards as other bulk email senders.
Context – Allegations that the largest tech companies have censored conservatives is the most unifying digital policy concern on the right. Republican suspicion of Big Tech firms run by Bay Area progressives is deep and longstanding. In 2020, Pew reported that 90% of Republicans suspected ideological motives behind platform decisions. In 2022, researchers at North Carolina State University released a paper claiming that during the 2020 election campaign Google’s spam filter appeared to identify Republican fundraising emails as spam to a far greater degree than Democratic emails. Following Republican complaints to Google leaders, the company created an opt-in program for campaign emails in the fall of 2022, but it was discarded in 2023 after the RNC refused to participate. The Federal Election Commission, with an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners, later rejected a formal Republican complaint and a federal court dismissed a parallel Republican lawsuit.