You’re skimming your inbox, looking for the emails you actually want to read amidst the endless Old Navy sales and depressing New York Times missives. Or you’re mindlessly scrolling Instagram, only to see a text notification pop up.
“Hi [Name]!” it starts. Or it gets straight into the meat of things. “amazing” all lowercase, maybe. “what on earth” no end punctuation.
You open the message…and it’s a politician, yet again asking you for money.
Eliza is just asking you to vote (and trying to eat my sticker).
How did we get here? How did we all start getting deluged with messages from political figures, and how did those messages get so weird? So oddly personal, so informal, so…WTF?
When trying to dig into the origins of the phenomenon, I found at least one report tracing it back to the 2012 presidential election. It turns out, the Obama campaign rigorously tested their email marketing, and those offbeat, casual emails really did work.
In other words, all those baffling texts you’re getting today? Yeah, thanks Obama.
In reality, I’m sure lots of politicians have been testing out similar strategies, learning from one another and building upon what works in subsequent election seasons. As we get ever more online, it only gets worse.
I also found an academic study digging into what it calls the “manipulative tactics” found in political emails during the 2020 election, and while it’s definitely a little jarring as a marketing writer to see some practices I think of as good marketing labeled “dark patterns,” they’re definitely on to something when they talk about the strategy of “exploit[ing] recipients’ curiosity gap and impos[ing] pressure to open emails.”
Of course, what annoys many of us the most is ending up on these lists in the first place, either by making one donation and being added to dozens of them or having it happen entirely against our will—like everyone who randomly started getting texts from Nikki Haley recently, or the fact that the Baltimore Democrats won’t stop texting me when that hasn’t been my legal address for almost a decade.
Ahem. Anyway.
As a marketing copywriter, what interests me about political emails and texts these days is not where they came from, but how they’re written and the strategies the marketing teams writing them are employing. Remember, everyone rigorously tests their content these days, so the reason you’re seeing more of these uncomfortably familiar messages is because they work.
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One of the companies I used to work for built an entire system of categorizing marketing messaging based on Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, an evolutionary psychology framework that helps you identify emotions and understand how they’re connected. Once you know this system, you can see it everywhere.
And since people are more motivated by emotions than they are by logic, appealing to particular emotions on the wheel is a great way of getting people to do what you want. Marketers know this.
So, what emotions are politicians trying to appeal to when they send you all these emails, and why do they bother us so much? Let’s take a look.1
Intimacy; Or, Acting Like You Know Me When, Let Us Be Clear, You Do Not
Doesn’t it feel good when you get a text from someone you’re close to? Especially when they want to know how you’re really doing, or they tell you something personal about themselves?
Invoking Intimacy is a great way to get someone’s eyes on what you’ve written. It’s the reason so many political texts start with something like “Hey [Name], it’s Nikki” or use the sort of punctuation you’d associate with a message from a friend.
But when I saw this email from California Representative Adam Schiff, I knew I’d hit the motherlode:
[Name], over the holidays, my father recently reminded me about this photo from my Bar Mitzvah and I just had to share it with you.
I’ll admit, it’s easy to chuckle at this photo — the classic 1970s bow tie, the braces, the yarmulke, the looks — but it is also an opportunity to tell you a little about how I approach my faith.
One of my favorite passages comes from Micah: What is required of us, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.
These principles have guided my work in Congress. They have led me to pursue criminal justice reform, to make housing the homeless a key priority, to attack discrimination, and to ensure the rule of law is applied equally. They have also guided my path as I held accountable and stood up to the most unscrupulous man to ever occupy the Oval Office.
And they guide me in the fight we face today: repairing and rebuilding our democracy so that we leave it better for my children and yours.
That’s why I put everything I have into my work in Congress and for the cause of our democracy. It’s the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning, and I don’t rest until I’ve done all I can for the day.
If these priorities resonate with you, I’m asking for your help to continue that work by chipping in $18 to my campaign before our end-of-year fundraising deadline.
This is fascinating, right? I don’t know about you, but pulling out old photos of people’s bar mitzvah photos to laugh at them is a staple of my extended family gatherings.2 It’s a feel-good moment because it shows vulnerability among people you care about.
In this email, Schiff takes that concept and then uses it to establish his political platform. When you read this email, you feel like you know the Congressman better as a person, which builds trust.
There’s also something very clever about leading with Judaism, an identity that’s relatively rare in our country (though Schiff’s Los Angeles district is undoubtedly a more Jewish area than many). Writers know that readers connect better to specific stories of individuals than bland platitudes, even if those individuals don’t share an identity with the reader—it’s why pretty much all journalism pieces investigating larger trends still begin with the story of one person as the lede.
You may not be Jewish or know what Micah is, but anyone who considers themselves guided by their faith can recognize a kindred spirit in Schiff. At the same time, the specific Jewish references (like the $18 callout, recognizable to anyone who’s ever attended a bar mitzvah) establish a clear in-group for readers who recognize the signs. Both of those are deliberate marketing tactics.
Anxiety; Or, Actively Trying to Make Me Even More Freaked Out About the State of the World Than I Already Am
With ever-increasing political polarization, an ongoing deadly pandemic that has been fully politicized, and the slow degradation of basic human rights in America, the stakes in each election have never been higher.
It’s also quite bad for you to exist in a constant state of fear. Chronic stress wrecks your mind and your body. You’d think, given everything going on in the world, elected figures who care about their districts would try to limit making people feel even worse.
Unfortunately, appealing to a reader’s anxiety is a fantastic method of getting their attention and motivating them to act. One of the worst offenders on this front? Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Here she is after the Supreme Court decision gutting Roe vs. Wade:
I need your immediate attention.
Trump’s Supreme Court just ruled to rip reproductive rights away from every single woman in this country.
I don’t say this lightly:
How we act TODAY will decide the future of reproductive rights.
We can either sit back and admit defeat to these far-right extremists…
Or we can RISE UP, meet this ONCE-IN-A-GENERATION moment, and marshal a response so HISTORIC that we make every last anti-choice Republican REGRET what they’ve done. Please, I’ve never needed your support more than today. Can you chip in $15 so we can WIN these midterms and finally codify reproductive rights into law? >>
This isn’t a normal fundraising email.
And a normal response won’t suffice.
Tomorrow morning, Republican operatives will look at our results from THIS EMAIL to see whether strong Democrats like you are fired up.
If we post the same run-of-the-mill numbers, McConnell and McCarthy will think they can get away with ANYTHING.
So, I’m asking you to step up in this moment of crisis.
Our ONLY option is to marshal a response so historic -- 100,000 gifts before midnight -- that we DEFEAT every anti-choice Republican that made this happen, EXPAND our Majorities, and FINALLY codify our reproductive rights into law. So, can I expect to see your name on my “Pro-Choice Champion” list tomorrow morning? >>
I know you’re livid. We both are. But in times of crisis, our ONLY response can be to stand up and fight for what’s right.
Thank you for fighting with me on the right side of history.
I’m exhausted just reading this. From the first sentence, Pelosi is all in on Anxiety. The all-caps emphasis, the violence of “rip reproductive rights away,” the aggressive sales pitch…it’s so much. And was the thing we really needed in this moment to make people even more afraid?
But the thing is, it worked. Not necessarily this email (that I don’t know), but Democrats have been making remarkable gains based on abortion, the rage people feel about the Supreme Court and their terror over possibly losing access to it completely.
Urgency; Or, Acting Like You Need Me Right Now When the Election Is Still Ten Months Away
Urgency is a tricky emotion to work with. Unlike Intimacy and Anxiety, which are pretty surefire ways of getting someone’s attention, Urgency has oversaturated the market—think of all the emails you get from retailers about sales ending or products selling out—and only tends to work when the deadline it invokes is real.
What’s challenging about political fundraising is that usually the only true deadline is Election Day itself, but if a politician is going to be able to use your donation to meaningfully influence their chances of reelection, they need to receive the money before then.
Take the Nancy Pelosi email above, which in addition to Anxiety is also chock full of Urgency—why exactly does it matter if you donate to the Democratic Party within the first 24 hours after the Supreme Court decision rather than a few days afterward? To “show the Republicans we mean business”? It’s a classic case of false urgency.
For another example of Urgency that’s not quite so bundled up in Anxiety (though the two often go hand in hand), here’s a campaign text from Joe Biden:4
[Name], it’s Joe Biden. I hope your first two weeks of 2024 have started off on the right foot. For our team, the reality is sinking in: the election year is here, and we can’t afford to take a single moment for granted.
[Name], your support made an impact last time around. I really mean it. Victory took the combined strength of all of us in 2020, and 2024 is going to be no different. But together, we’ll get it done — I know we will. That’s why I’m asking you to pitch in what you can today — let’s finish the job and deliver for millions of Americans across this country. I hope you’ll help get us there: [link]
This is a softer Urgency, and I honestly appreciate the lack of aggression given how much more intense most politicians make their time-based appeals. On the other hand, this is clearly a first touch message, and there is plenty of time for the Biden campaign to ramp up from here.
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Overall, I’ve found that I personally find messaging like this less annoying when I understand where the sender is coming from and why they’re doing it: data shows emotional appeals are effective, it’s honestly really hard to keep coming up with new ways to ask people for money, and so on. I hope you’ll feel similarly, because that’s all I can offer you—I definitely don’t have the power to make them stop.
Have you seen any particularly egregious examples of political emails and texts lately? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
We’re only looking at examples from Democrats because I don’t want to publish anything as offensive as the typical Republican political email to their base on this platform. But believe me, Republican emails and texts are doing the same thing, only with racist dog whistles and a veneer of falsehood on top.
Substack formatting won’t let me do this, but the two long bolded paragraphs are also underlined and bright red in the original email. The failed emdashes and old person-style capitalization, however, are all Pelosi.
