The Update Desk: Who Loves Me Baby?

A week ago, I decided to test my tolerance for email bombardment, and test the tenacity of the top candidates vying to be the Democratic presidential nominee at the same time.

This all started because I was getting A LOT of emails from Joe Biden, and nothing from the other candidates. I wasn't sure why that was happening, so I devised a plan to find out how the top candidates communicate with potential voters. Here's an excerpt from my post setting up the experiment.

So: now that the field has been cut in half, at least for a couple of weeks, and in the interest of trying to get a sense of how aggressive (desperate?) the other candidates are relative to Biden, I signed up on all of their websites today, using one of my alternate emails. I'm going to unsubscribe to Biden emails under my primary account (which would be the one on file from the Obama donation I made) and see how things go.

I can tell you that it took me 12 minutes to locate all of their official websites, enter my email address and zip code and become a 'supporter' of each of the ten. And so far, 45 minutes later, I've only gotten 'thanks for signing up' messages from three campaigns: Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and yep - you guessed it, Joe Biden.

After a full week of opportunity, how are things going?  Well, I received 100 emails, 69 of which directly asked for money (any amount or a specific amount), by including one or more links, one or more buttons, or both.  By candidate, here's the total number of emails received (and the number asking for money):

• Joe Biden: 10 (7)
• Cory Booker: 18 (10)
• Pete Buttigieg: 11 (5)
• Julian Castro: 9 (5)
• Kamala Harris: 14 (11)
• Amy Klobuchar: 12 (8)
• Beto O'Rourke: 8 (7)
• Bernie Sanders: 11 (90
• Elizabeth Warren: 6 (6)
• Andrew Yang: 1 (1)

Booker was first to respond, followed by Biden and Harris, who hit me simultaneously. All three were within 10 minutes of me signing up on their pages. Andrew Yang was last - dead last, by a long shot. I actually signed up a second time when, after four days of nothing, I figured I might not have completed my first submission. I finally heard from him last night, around 6PM.

Other than money, what are the candidates talking about? 

• General info, with 57 emails, led the way. Harris (10), Booker and Sanders (8),  Klobuchar (7) and Biden (6) were out in front here. Candidates talked about their families, their backgrounds, why they were running, their favorite teacher (my first email from Buttigieg), and why we need to do something other than more Trump. Guns popped up a couple of times here as well.
• Next week's debate was second, with 21 emails. Buttigieg and Castro (four each), followed by Biden, Booker and Klobuchar (3 each) were ahead of the pack on this one. Some of the candidates are running contests, with the winner going to Houston. 
• Climate change (17 emails, six from Booker alone - none from Castro, O'Rourke, or Yang) was the third most talked about issue, as folks prepared for the CNN town hall last night. 
• Jobs - specifically union jobs - was a distant fourth. Five of the 10 candidates issued Labor Day messages mentioning union jobs.

What aren't the candidates talking about? The economy, education, foreign policy, health insurance, or immigration, unless they included those in a 'general' message. No email addressed any of those issues individually, likely because the candidates are gearing their efforts towards whatever is the flavor of the day - the climate change Town Hall, the debate, and the August 31st filing deadline being among those flavors. 

The most personal messages came from Beto O'Rourke, hands down. His email on the shootings in Odessa and Midland deeply saddened him, while the widely-shared fake news that the shooter had a Beto sticker on his car outraged him. Other than Mayor Pete's email about teachers (I'm the daughter of two very good ones, so that one was close to my heart), none of the rest of what I read really stuck with me.

Up to this point, I've been an observer, just tracking what the candidates have sent me. Going forward, I'm going to be a non-financial participant. Offer me a survey, I'm going to take it. Ask for my signature on a petition, you'll get it. I'm going to see if that changes anything with the emails. I'm going to hold off donating until after the debate.

And I really hope that Andrew Yang does something with his website monitoring. I don't want to wait almost a full week to hear from my next president, especially since the current one won't be quiet, about anything.