Republicans Were Sent to Spam More Often Than Democrats | Hacker News Reader

Republicans Were Sent to Spam More Often Than Democrats

imge.com

15 pointsmbgaxyz11 comments

From article:

Our team created email addresses with different email providers and signed up for the email lists of around fifty different candidates, committees, and political nonprofits. In the month leading up to the election, we tracked how many emails were sent from each entity, and what percentage of those emails made it into our inbox.

In Nevada, Democrat Jacky Rosen averaged over 90% placement in inboxes, compared to Dean Heller’s over 90% placement in spam.

In Florida, 100% of Republican Rick Scott’s emails went to spam in Yahoo, while 100% of Bill Nelson’s emails went to our Yahoo inbox.

While these were the most dramatic examples, this pattern emerged in every toss-up Senate race we tracked.

I'm completely unsurprised that Heller emails ended up in SPAM at a high rate. I was bombarded with email from his campaign and various PACs supporting him. All of the emails were sent to an email address that was used to donate to an unrelated Republican candidate in 2008. There's a whole lot of really obvious list sharing going on.

I expected a lot more depth from this article considering the heavy implication that email providers are suppressing republican-sent emails in some purposeful way. This mostly just reads like a marketer trying to find a new customer cohort based on superficial analysis.

Alternative headline: Did Republicans send more spam emails in the 2018 Election?

FTA

Democrats sent over four times the quantity of emails than their Republican opponents

If quantity is one of the factors to be considered, unlikely.

Quantity and quality of emails are often related, but what if the Democrats just had 4x the number of people subscribed to their email lists?

The article is saying that to the tested inboxes (Yahoo, AOL, Gmail) the Democrats sent 4x as much as the Republicans. The number of subscribers has no bearing on this.

Would it be possible that people are abusing the spam reporting for these email providers? Get a large enough group of people online to sign up for these candidates and mass report these emails as spam.

I'd love to see some word counts and sentiment analysis as part of this.

TL;DR: marketer fails to science.

No.

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