This Time It’s Urgent: Inside Battleground Candidates’ Email Strategy

Democrats running for the most competitive Senate seats are betting that folks are more likely to open up their wallets to defeat President Donald Trump and Elon Musk than their in-state rivals.

Take Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who invoked the president’s name two times in emails to supporters during a recent two-week span — “Need a big response TODAY (re: Trump),” he wrote one recent Tuesday — but failed to mention his November opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, a single time.

A prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidate making the president a focus of his messaging isn’t too surprising, especially given Ossoff’s eagerness to prod Trump publicly.

But he’s far from alone.

A POLITICO analysis of 325 campaign fundraising email subject lines sent by 10 Democratic candidates in the top Senate races from Jul. 28 to Aug. 11 found that they referenced nationally recognized figures like Trump and Musk in nearly twice as many emails as they referenced their in-state opponents.

The president and his sometime close ally, who is expected to spend big in the midterms, were by far the most mentioned names, appearing seven times each — once on the same subject line. Former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, running to unseat Sen. Jon Husted, brought them up the most (three times for Trump and twice for Musk) while mentioning Husted thrice.

Others mentioned in these emails: Vice President JD Vance (twice), Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

That pattern makes sense for Senate campaigns that tend to have expansive fundraising networks that draw from out of state, said Craig Frucht, partner at Democratic consulting firm Ascend Digital Strategies.

“A lot of the folks those programs are reaching are less familiar with the specific GOP opponent than they are with prominent GOP figures who are in the news a lot,” Frucht said.

POLITICO recently registered a phone number and email address for the major Democratic candidates running in Michigan, Alaska, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, Georgia, Maine and North Carolina. (When a ZIP code was required, POLITICO used the code corresponding to the respective state’s capital.)

The nine states yielded 10 senders, with Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens facing off in the Michigan primary election during the collection period.

POLITICO didn’t receive any emails directly from Maine Democratic nominee Troy Jackson during this period, but other campaigns sent five joint fundraising emails with him, which were included in this analysis.

POLITICO also signed up for the Republican candidates' email lists, but received emails from only one — Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan — during the two-week collection period. His emails were filtered out to make this analysis exclusively Democratic.

Both parties in recent years have mulled over how often to tap their fundraising lists for small-dollar donations and the ethical questions raised by hyper-aggressive fundraising schemes, which critics say turn party supporters away over time.

Still, it remains a core part of party fundraising. And now, committees and candidates appear to be on the precipice of an emailing boom after Google announced its latest program giving registered political groups the ability to bypass Gmail’s spam filter — a change that followed years of complaints from Republicans that the company’s spam algorithm was biased. (That change occurred after POLITICO had finished collecting emails for this story.)

Getting big names to sign off on fundraising appeals remains a relatively popular strategy. Democrats flexed their endorsements from other elected officials and celebrities in just under 9 percent of their emails. New Hampshire Rep. Chris Pappas used this the most, drawing on his allies for 27 percent of his emails, including ones from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and filmmaker Ken Burns.

Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola captured the fictional executive branch with emails from Martin Sheen of "The West Wing" and Julia Louis-Dreyfus from "Veep."

Audrey Glaser, email director at progressive consulting firm Middle Seat, said those alternate authors can help reach certain parts of the donor base. Case in point: The most prolific guest writer in the sample was Democratic pundit James Carville, who wrote six emails for Pappas, Ossoff, former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and Stevens.

“A lot of older Democratic donors love James Carville,” said Glaser, whose firm has worked for Pappas and El-Sayed.

The campaigns also leaned on a handful of emotional tones to lead their communications — particularly fear of imminent defeat, like El-Sayed’s Aug. 7 assertion that “He's one step ahead, for now” or other subject lines that portrayed an overwhelming financial mismatch against their opponents.

Urgency, usually manifesting in the form of a looming FEC deadline or a candidate’s plea that they “need you to read this,” appeared in 13 percent of emails in the sample.

Other times, campaigns tried to pique readers’ curiosities with purposefully vague subject lines or with outright questions, like the time Ossoff messaged POLITICO at 11:30 p.m. with the subject line “Can I be honest with you?”

Some standouts: POLITICO — which read every email and manually categorized them — coded roughly 27 percent of emails from the Pappas campaign to rely on fear, like his warning of “$28 million against us” and proclamation on Aug. 8 that “we need to turn this around.” Peltola, meanwhile, used urgency in 27 percent of emails originating from her team.

Striking an emotionally resonant tone is essential for any successful fundraising campaign, Frucht said, but it’s possible to cross an ethical line when capturing readers’ attention steps into alarmist, outright deceptive territory.

None of the emails Score looked at during the two week collection period touched the hyper-provocactive language emblematic of so-called “Scam PACs.”

“You need to convey urgency and you need to convey the stakes,” Frucht said. “But that doesn't mean inventing urgency and inventing stakes.”