Have We Finally Hit "Peak Email"?

As it becomes clear that online fundraising numbers are down across the board, it's high time we got back to the basics of actual organizing.

According to the Archive of Political Emails, a project of the Defending Democracy Together Initiative, since July 2019 the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has sent out 8,618 emails, or roughly six per day. The Democratic Governors Association has sent 7,732. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has sent 3,741.

Republicans are just as bad. Donald Trump has sent 15,719 emails, or more than ten per day; the RNC has sent 6,340. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has sent 3,385.

Some individual candidates have matched these numbers. Val Demings, a Democrat who ran an ill-fated campaign for US Senate in Florida in 2022, sent more than 4,000 messages. Marcus Flowers, a Black veteran who had absolutely no chance of defeating incumbent Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon), sent more than 3,100.

The archive’s list of top email senders shows just how intensely the modern universe of political actors and advocacy organizations have come to rely on massive email operations. On the left, the most active emailers include Portside, Daily Kos, March On (a Women’s March spinoff), All on the Line (Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s anti-gerrymandering group), the Democratic Victory PAC, Voter Protection Project, United We Dream, Progressive Majority PAC, Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the House Majority PAC. All of these groups sent more than 2,000 emails since the archive began collecting them in July 2019, or more than one per day. You could almost say that without email, these groups would barely exist.

What does this all add up to? As Will Easton, former director of digital fundraising and engagement at People for the American Way, and a veteran digital fundraiser who played similar roles at the Mozilla Foundation, NextGen Climate, and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, put it, “When you strip-mine an entire ecosystem with spammy emails, you probably shouldn’t expect very good harvests for the next few years.” He was responding to a recent story in Politico about the dramatic downturn in small-dollar donations across the political arena. Giving in 2023 to the DCCC through June is down by a third compared to the same period two years ago. Overall giving through the Democratic fundraising supersite ActBlue was $312 million for the first half of 2023, a drop of more than $30 million compared to the same point four years ago.

Democratic party operatives cite a variety of reasons for the downturn, including inflation putting a squeeze on retirees, who are a bulwark of small political giving; the summer slump that always happens when people go on vacation (though the data cited is through June 30 and doesn’t include the summer); and Trump fatigue. But to a person they all say grassroots enthusiasm will rebound as 2024 comes into focus. “As we lean on the issues important to the American people, we are going to see that engagement go back up,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX), a Biden campaign co-chair, told Politico. Unfortunately, there’s no way to test that proposition until it’s too late.

Is Something Bigger Going on Here?

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the ways that “churn and burn” digital fundraising practices are damaging the already tenuous connection between grassroots givers and the Democratic array of party committees, politicians and allied advocacy organizations. But the news that groups like Justice Democrats, Democratic Socialists of America and The Intercept are also seeing a drop in support suggests there may be more happening here than people deciding that their email and text in-boxes have become overloaded with shrill and cynical pitches for “$3 before this critical fundraising deadline.”

In case you missed it, Justice Democrats, which was founded six years ago out of the remains of Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign to recruit and support progressive primary challengers in congressional races, recently announced that it was laying off nine of its twenty staff. DSA, which exploded with new members after 2016, growing to 80,000, has quietly shelved a 2020 plan to expand to 100,000, Ross Barkan reports for The New Republic. “Our fundraising is down,” The Intercept pleaded in an email that just popped into my in-box, “at a time when independent journalism is more necessary than ever.”

What is going on? I have a few theories, which I’ll call Peak Email, Vertical Fragmentation, and the Great Resignation.

1. Remember the concept of “Peak Oil”? That referred to the idea that at some point the rate of oil production would start to inexorably decline, as known reserves get used up and new ones stop getting discovered. Well, maybe we’ve just hit Peak Email, as the number of new people who are susceptible to pleas for their donations stops replacing the number of people who have decided to tune out. (I’d include SMS-based fundraising to that picture, by the way—it boomed in the last half-decade or so, but maybe it too is running dry.)

2. Vertical Fragmentation is the combination of two trends. First, the way that digital organizing has relentlessly turned local, horizontal collectives of people who might share common interests and therefore support a candidate or cause into giant verticals of lists that a handful of people mine for support. To put this in simple terms: there may be hundreds of people in my little town of Hastings-on-Hudson, population 8,482, that donate to MoveOn or the ACLU or the DSCC, but none of those organizations care a whit about connecting us to each other. Very little money raised through these digital methods gets reinvested in strengthening the communities that it comes from. And the fragmentation of our media landscapes into ever smaller slivers only exacerbates this weakness.

3. Finally, it seems as though the Great Resignation has hit politics. The Great Resignation is a term economists coined to describe the millions of workers, mainly in the service sector, who quit their jobs in the middle of the Covid pandemic, because of lousy working conditions and a desire for better work-life balance. “Enough! My job isn’t getting me anywhere,” people seemed to be saying en masse. What I’m wondering is whether people who were previously politically active have also decided, “Enough! My activism isn’t getting us anywhere.” In other words, whether its frustration at gridlock, or dismay at how little our elected representatives seem to respond to grassroots pressure, or exhaustion with being pushed to perform repetitive and underwhelming acts of voter engagement like phone-banking, or despair that nothing, not even big protest marches, seems to lead to change—maybe we are in the middle of a collective collapse of energy.

To be sure, there are counter-trends and bright spots here and there. I’m currently closely engaged with two organizations that are in the middle of campaign launches, IfNotNow, which is reviving itself around a push to make AIPAC money radioactive in Democratic primaries, and Get Free, which is starting to execute the first steps in a long-range plan to build a national political consensus around the need for reparations. One thing I noticed about both of the organizing meetings I attended of these groups—one in person at a bar on the Lower East Side, and one on Zoom—is that they were light-hearted and fun. (Which is not something you can say about the entire universe of online organizing these days.) It’s way too soon to say how these initiatives will play out, but the involvement of scores of committed young people is always a good sign. Stay tuned.

Playing an AIPAC trivia contest with IfNotNow NYC, August 2023 (Photo by Micah Sifry)

Odds and Ends

—Republican state parties in battleground states like Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania as well as California and New York, are either falling apart due to far-right fanatics taking them over or being kept on life support by infusions of money from national Republican leadership committees, Politico reports.

—Don’t miss the New York Times’ detailed report on how Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy leftwing tech executive who founded the company Thoughtworks, has been working closely with the Chinese government as well as an array of fellow traveler organizations, including Code Pink, a US peace group that now takes the Chinese party line on the treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority. It’s sad to see a lot of people who ought to know better aligning themselves with Code Pink and claiming the Times’ report amounts to “anti-China McCarthyism.”

—Here's a thought-provoking encounter between a self-described “flaming leftist,” John Russell, and a bunch of white working class voters on line at a Trump rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. It’s interesting how much class solidarity is possible when no one is dogwhistling about immigrants or urban crime.

—Say hello to Oath.vote, a new effort to give Democratic donors a one-stop shopping way to focus their political donations on candidates that can win that need the money the most.

End Times

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