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Today is the end of the first fundraising quarter for candidates for federal office. By April 15th, all candidates for federal office, as well as all federal PACs, have to disclose how much cash they have on hand, how much they raised from January 1st through March 31st, and what expenditures they made.
In an attempt to make themselves appear more viable to party committees, to media outlets, and to other donors, candidates try to rack up as many donations as possible on the last day of the quarter. With email now such an essential part of campaign fundraising to a huge deluge of political fundraising emails today. For some perspective, at 1:30 p.m. Today, eastern, Brandon English tweeted that he had already received 53 email fundraising asks today:
Now 53 end-of-quarter emails in my inbox today. Most popular subject lines are "Midnight" and "X hours to go". Give to your fav Dems today!
Now, Brandon works on new media for the DCCC, so he might be on more of these candidate email lists than anyone in the country. He also clearly isn't bothered by the deluge.
However, with literally hundreds of campaigns sending out fundraising emails today, and with many campaigns selling their email lists to other campaigns as a means of paying off campaign debt after elections are over, the signal to noise ratio for online organizers is reaching a disturbing level. I have donated to about 25 different federal campaigns since 2003, mostly in small amounts, and as a result I have received dozens of emails over the past week. Instead of reading them, these days I am pretty much just deleting them all.
While most campaigns will still make far more money over email today than they made any other day this year, the possibility of a long-term, chronic decline seems real. As more campaigns sell their lists to each other, and as campaign email lists grow larger, the usefulness of email as an activism tool can only decline on an email per email basis. And then, as individual emails become less valuable, campaign email lists might grow even larger, as they become cheaper to purchase.
Email remains at the center of new media political organizing for now, but days like today are a reminder that won't be the case forever. Eventually, social networking will replace email, since social networking groups cannot be sold and since it is much easier for an individual to choose which groups they join. This probably doesn't spell danger for large, email-based activism organizations over the next few years, but in a decade, or perhaps a little more, the declining value of email will make the basic structure of online political activism completely different than it is now.
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