An Email List With 71 Million Contacts?

by: Chris Bowers

Tue Dec 11, 2007 at 02:21


This is mind-blowing, for several reasons:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's surge in Iowa, from single digits in the polls to a virtual tie for the lead among Republicans, has captivated the political world and prompted speculation about just how he did it.

The Fix may have found the answer: a physician from Montgomery, Ala., named Randy Brinson.

Brinson is the keeper of a massive e-mail list of much-coveted Christian voters that Huckabee is using to reach and organize people in early-voting states such as Iowa.

Brinson's list numbers about 71 million contacts, with 25 million identified as belonging to "25 and 45 years old, upwardly mobile, right-of-center, conservative households," he said.

The list was constructed for GOTV and voter registration purposes during 2004 using publicity around Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ. Here is why this is mind-blowing. First, the list has 414,000 contact in Iowa alone, which is stunning. Second, if it is still active enough to play a major role in swinging a presidential nomination contest, what was it doing for the previous three years? Third, all of this has been taking place so under the radar, that there isn't even a wiki entry on Randy Brinson. I mean, there is a wiki entry on me, for crying out loud, and there isn't one on some guy with the largest functional email list in the entire country. How did the continuing operation of a list this size go so under the radar? There are 71 million contacts on the list--everyone should know about it.

This is pretty remarkable. Street Prophets has more on both the list and on Randy Brinson.

Chris Bowers :: An Email List With 71 Million Contacts?

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An Email List With 71 Million Contacts? | 23 comments
Wow... (4.00 / 1)
maybe we can work on putting together an equivalent list for the left the next time a Woody Allen movie comes out
that is a multitude of a fuckton (0.00 / 0)
Too bad the online outreach sucked so bad for Michael Moore's movies.

On twitter: @BobBrigham
Community and Profiling (0.00 / 0)
The left lacks a community grounding comparable to the right. I mean the right has a meeting every Sunday, and then after events, and social networks which are all 'under the radar.' My father in law is a right-wing Southern Baptist Republican/Gideon (yes and I am a volunteer MoveOn Council head for my town), and the networks he takes for granted are insane.

We need to think about tapping into culture more. We tried to do it with The Day After Tommorow (the terrible film about abrupt climate change) but I don't think it amounted to much.

The Right is better about profiling its members. I read that they went and found every unregistered person who owns a snowplow in our country and automatically labeled them a Republican because stastically if you own a snow plow, you are conservative.

Imagine if we could do that. A Hybrid car is the closest thing to my mind.

We won the Battle. Now the Real Fight for Change Begins. Join MoveOn.org and fight for progressive change.  

Maybe just identify everyone (0.00 / 0)
that is not on the right wing lists.  Statistically, they'd be more to the left.

You know, put THEIR organization skills to work for YOU.


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

[ Parent ]
How? (0.00 / 0)


We won the Battle. Now the Real Fight for Change Begins. Join MoveOn.org and fight for progressive change.  
[ Parent ]
A piss-poor joke w/ a ring of truth (0.00 / 0)
An indirect comment on the huge number of addresses on this list - explored in other posts.

Your basic tenor was that the Right wing is so much better at profiling and making lists, AND they've done so with such a huge number - all that's left for the Left is to send their messages to all those that the Right wing does not.


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

[ Parent ]
What's that about one third of the population? (4.00 / 1)
Count me dubious. That would have to be just about every 'conservative' in the nation and....

they's all have to have email.

Sorry, not believable. But I'll check out SP.

Peace, Health and Prosperity for Everyone.

Damn (0.00 / 0)
This is a pretty good explanation of how a guy who raised virtually no money could climb so fast.

Yes, Huckabee is a tremendously good personal seller, but without any kind of media reach, no one would have ever seen or heard him.

http://www.ProgressFlorida.org

Spammer (4.00 / 2)
I'm getting email from Huckabee and I can assure you, as a left-wing hippie atheist, I am extremely unlikely to support him. It sounds to me like Brinson is just scooping up email lists from everywhere. Maybe he is buying spam lists -- I also get tons of spam everyday, as I'm sure you do too.
big number but what % is live? (0.00 / 0)
I get tons of spam, I have about 5 email accounts myself.  But that said if just 10% is live that's still 7 million contacts.  This is not something that should be ignored but I doubt it 100% represents what it purports to be.
Strange Politics (0.00 / 0)
Check out this pdf:

http://207.159.142.1...

Brinson seems to have been sympathetic to the campaign of Democrat John Arthur Eaves Jr. in Mississippi this year.

I wonder if that campaign used the list.

Possible (0.00 / 0)
Eaves ran on a Christian Conservative/populist platform (think William Jennings Bryan in his later years) and Brinson's been willing to operate on both sides of the aisle, especially since most mainstream Republicans seem to have ignored him.

Forgotten Countries - a foreign policy-focused blog
[ Parent ]
Give me a couple hundred thousand bucks (4.00 / 1)
... and I could put together a list that big too.

It's not what's fueling Huckabee. For one thing, if it was originally put together in 2004 more than half of those addresses (probably WAY more than half) are bad or connect to people who have moved from where the list has them residing. So start with maybe 200,000 in Iowa. Not bad, but then consider the open rate for spam e-mails and you're down to maybe 20,000. Take out those who open but don't read or take seriously and you're down to a few thousand. Take out the ones who already support Huckabee or another Repub and you're "influencing" very few actual voters.

E-mail organizing doesn't work at all except for the limited case of ensuring known supporters go to the polls. There it works very well, but that's not what Huckabee is doing right now.

Huckabee is surging because there literally is no one else to support for social conservatives. For a more accurate explanation of why it happened so quickly, read Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point." These are complex systems, and sometimes an avalanche of people can do the same thing at more or less the same time, seemingly (but not really) independently.

Hmm ... Just thought about this some more (4.00 / 1)
A list of 71 million e-mail addresses is worth something. Particularly one that purports to be assembled based on common characteristics. Typically large lists are worth, on the open market, somewhere in the range of $80-90 per thousand names. No matter how you calculate, this list is worth huge bucks, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions. The individual giving limit, whether by check or in-kind, is $4,600.

If this guy is giving this list to one candidate exclusively, he is violating campaign finance law in a HUGE way.

Not to mention (0.00 / 0)
that the list apparently was put together originally by a non-profit. That makes it even worse.

This is flat out illegal.

[ Parent ]
That's a really good point (4.00 / 1)
Way, way, way illegal if it is overtly helping Huckabee. We should press this one.
[ Parent ]
From the article (0.00 / 0)
Huckabee bit, hiring Webcasting TV -- a for-profit manager of the list -- as a consultant to his campaign

[ Parent ]
OK, so two key questions (0.00 / 0)
1. Is this list being made available to other campaigns? If not, this is a gift flat out and is illegal.

2. More importantly (since #1 is hard to prove), you cannot "hire" the manager of a list worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (for a few thousand a month or whatever) and have the list come along for the ride. You just can't. That would be like a media consultant who likes a particular candidate doing the creatives for free, or "adding" some TV time onto a buy at their own expense. Campaigns must pay more or less "market rate" for services or things like lists, or it's a campaign contribution. That's a very clear cut standard.

[ Parent ]
Longer blockquote (0.00 / 0)
After the 2004 presidential election, Brinson went to each of the presidential campaigns, Republicans and Democrats, to pitch his list. Huckabee bit, hiring Webcasting TV -- a for-profit manager of the list -- as a consultant to his campaign. (Redeem the Vote is a not-for-profit group and, as such, does no political work.)

Webcasting TV

[ Parent ]
So eliminate question #1 (0.00 / 0)
Question #2 is still very valid. If Mike Huckabee is gaining access to a 71 million strong list simply by hiring its manager for a few thousand dollars, he's violating the law.

He's not even hiring the list's owner. If this quote is accurate, he's hiring the MANAGER of a list and getting access to it. That would be like hiring the guy who runs the database for Time magazine and getting their subscriber list in the bargain. It doesn't matter who manages it, what matters is who owns it. And if Randy Brinson owns that list and Huckabee is acquiring it for pennies on the dollar, that is an illegal campaign contribution.

What am I missing here? Any campaign finance attorneys out there?

[ Parent ]
Or I should say (0.00 / 0)
It matters how much Huckabee PAID for this list, not who owns or manages it.
[ Parent ]
Hillary's List (0.00 / 0)
I should point out that one of Hillary's important backers has an even larger email and direct mail list, that is his business.  Check InfoUSA.com.

There are all kinds of direct mail and email lists you can buy out there:

http://lists.nextmar...

hmm...e-smears? (0.00 / 0)
It occurs to me that a good email-based whisper campaign could be started off of a very small sample of that list.  Give me or any semi-competent operative an hour and a SQL database of that list, and watch bedlam ensue.

You could use something like that to build massive, self-sustaining listservs, too.  The righties don't have much in the way of blog activism, but a string of self-growing email listservs could easily be shaped to fill that void and provide online organization easy enough for the average Fox News viewer to grok.

spooky

Yeah I blog.

An Email List With 71 Million Contacts? | 23 comments




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