The Update Desk: Who Loves Me, Baby? (7)

It's that time again - another Thursday spent reading emails from the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Well, the top 10 of them, that is. I won't be adding anyone to my social experiment, so Tulsi Gabbard and Tom Steyer and the rest of them who are still in the race but not making it to the debates? Yeah, our relationship is going nowhere.

For the ten contenders, if that's the right word to use, I'm close to cutting a few of you loose, if you don't cut yourselves loose first. Just being honest, and we all know honesty is the best policy - even better than Medicare for All.

I'm changing things up again a little, because it's been made very clear throughout the course of the social experiment that the majority the emails the candidates are sending are requests for money. Sure, sometimes there's a hint of policy, or news, but for the most part they are sending bald-faced money requests, so I'm not going to focus on that anymore. Instead, I'm going to focus on what they are talking about, in addition to money.

First, the numbers: I received 178 emails before this week's deadline. Because we had the debate on Tuesday, I bucketed the emails into those received by midnight on the 14th, the day before the debate, and emails received on debate day or later. 110 emails made it into the first bucket, with another 68 in the second one.  Here's the breakdown by candidate.

Diving a little deeper into the candidate's emails, here are some trends: 

• There was a lot of concern about not only their appearances at this weeks' debate, but also viability for the next one, and there were of course a number of post-debate emails celebrating individual performances.This was consistent across all candidates, whether (in my opinion) there was anything to celebrate from the debate, or not. 
• Several candidates tied emails to both pre-debate and post-debate fundraising goals; Kamala Harris had a fundraising email during the debate. Goals ranged from $100,000 (Castro) to $1,000,000 (Mayor Pete) to $2,000,000 in six weeks (O'Rourke), so you can see expectations are vastly different among the candidates. 
• It seemed the candidates asking for money the most were Harris and Warren - or at least, they were the most desperate.
• Surveys were common, as were merch rollouts; this is a continuing trend from the very beginning. Andrew Yang's campaign has a cool new scarf, while Bernie Sanders  is continuing his "Billionaires Should Not Exist" campaign, with a bumper sticker you can put on your neighbor's car or something. 
• Biden continued to focus on Trump, including a demand that the president produce his income taxes "or shut up" - a more strident approach then any of the others took. O'Rourke planned a protest rally during Trump's Texas visit, and also pointed out that Trump is a symptom, not the problem; Mayor Pete focused on his 'day after the Trump presidency' messaging, and Klobuchar said Trump could come to Minnesota as often as he wanted, but he wasn't going to win, 
• Harris had whole litany of things to talk about, including LGBTQ issues, which the other candidates got in before last week's deadline; electability; Don Junior's tweet about her laugh, which she milked for three emails alone, and reproductive rights.
• For her part, Warren clarified her position on who she'd take money from, and her plan for getting money out of politics should she win.
• Klobuchar focused on what's she's been doing in Iowa, her new ads, polls, and the debates; Yang focused on similar subjects, including having set and met goals already, as he continues to do well. 

All in all, they worked pretty hard this week. Booker had the most eclectic set of emails, including one asking for money for wildfire relief, and one from his girlfriend, Rosario Dawson, which was in the running for email of the week. 

But the winner there, hands down, was Julian Castro. Take a look:

BREAKING: After uproar when SNL failed to represent Julián Castro, the only Latino candidate running for President, SNL reverses course. WATCH THE SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE CLIP: See Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hilarious impression of Julián. After Julián was left out of SNL, there was an uproar. Activists all over the country wrote in to SNL, called them out on social media, and called NBC in protest.  And your activism worked -- after erasing the only Latino from the debate stage, this weekend SNL had none other than Lin-Manuel Miranda from Hamilton play Julián. Thanks for the laughs, Lin-Manuel! And thank you for your activism. -Team Julián

So - another week in the books. We saw humor, we saw desperation, we saw hope, and we saw personality.

I'll take it.