Marco Rubio is incompetent. Chuck Grassley is very old. Donald Trump is incredibly greedy. Put it all together and what do you get: a call to end the email spam filter so that every single campaign email that comes your way ends up at the top of your inbox. Because Republicans really think you’re not seeing enough campaign emails. Especially their emails.
As The Washington Post reports, Republicans got together at a recent luncheon and began whining that the campaign emails they were sending out just didn’t seem to get through to people. Why, they could send out five, 10, a dozen or more in a day, and they were lucky if just one showed up in someone’s inbox. And then they discovered that these emails were ending up in the spam box. Just because they were sending millions of them to people across the nation, outside their state or district, completely unsolicited. Which made Grassley very, very angry.
Grassley declared that sending emails to spam was the equivalent of the Post Office refusing to carry his campaign mail. “If you mail a letter, you expect it to be delivered,” said a reportedly “red-faced” Grassley. And because Republicans are Republicans, they immediately decided that Google was filtering out their stuff, because it’s a left-wing conspiracy.
So now Republicans are going to war with Google to remove Americans spam filters.
As it happens, the amount of campaign cash Republicans are raising through email is down. And they can’t understand it, because the number of emails they are sending it up, up, up. A single Trump-controlled PAC sends out a dozen a day. But somehow Republican fundraising is down 11% while Democratic fundraising is up by 21%. And Republican fundraising site WinRed continues to be trounced by Democratic site ActBlue.
It doesn’t seem to occur to Republicans that quantity of emails doesn’t guarantee success. It also doesn’t seem to have occur to them that after a season in which they’ve celebrated the triumph of removing the right to an abortion after 50 years, defended forcing a 10-year-old rape victim to carry her rapist’s child, invited people to sue teachers for daring to either recommend a classic book or accurately explain American history, and declared that the only thing that can be done about kids being shot in school is handing out more guns … maybe it’s just that no one wants to talk to them.
Never mind that. Republicans have introduced legislation in both chambers to strip away spam filters so that the full flood of their campaign emails can rain down on American’s inboxes just as God—and Chuck Grassley, who is older than God—intended.
The horrible thing is it’s already working. The barrage of complaints sent toward Google specifically actually has the biggest provider of email services talking to the Federal Election Commission about a program that would exempt campaign emails from spam filters.
If you would like to have an idea what it would be like, go to your spam filter right now and open it. Check how many campaign emails are in there. How many, many campaign emails.
And get out your hip waders. Because Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Chuck Grassley, and every other candidate for any office anywhere has a few hundred, or thousand, emails to send you.