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Google can't catch a break.
Amid a chorus of conservative bellyaching last summer—unfounded as it may have been—that Google was intentionally wielding its Gmail spam filter to limit the reach of Republican fundraising emails, the tech giant proposed a solution.
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With the permission of the Federal Election Commission, the company created a controversial pilot program that would take the filter out of the equation, allowing all political groups to receive direct access to inboxes, undercutting the GOP’s claims of ideological bias. (Those allegations may in reality be a self-own, reflecting the spammy and intimidating language of many GOP fundraising pitches.)
But when Google ended that equal access program in January, it wasn’t Republicans who were complaining—it was Democrats.
According to Democratic fundraisers who spoke to The Daily Beast for this article, the “abrupt” end to Google’s Verified Sender Program (VSP) dealt an unintended but significant setback to small-dollar progressive groups who had taken the company up on its offer.
Kenneth Pennington, founder of Middle Seat—a leading Democratic digital fundraising firm—alleged to The Daily Beast that some of his progressive clients were “irreparably damaged” by the way Google handled the experiment.
“Before the VSP program, there was a status quo in place about how senders were getting into inboxes which was fine, and it worked well for campaigns using typical best practices for email marketers,” Pennington said. “This program then incentivized people to make changes that hurt their sender reputation, and then with five days’ notice, Google announced they were shutting it down in a way that irreparably damaged the small-dollar campaigns that enrolled.”
Last week, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) weighed in, calling the fallout a “giant assist from Google to the billionaire donor class.”
The irony is thick.
First, the same Republicans that Google was trying to placate largely spurned the voluntary program. The GOP’s decision appears in part related to an anti-discrimination lawsuit the Republican National Committee filed against Google last October. After all, if the RNC had taken advantage of the offer and seen a benefit, Republicans would have been hard pressed to convince a court that Google was intentionally targeting conservatives. Google later revealed in a January court filing that the RNC never joined the program.
An RNC spokesperson didn’t reply to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
In a rare 6-0 bipartisan decision this January, the FEC tossed an RNC complaint that said Google had intentionally deployed its technology with a political bias against Republicans, constituting “illegal in-kind contributions” to Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates. The complaint cited a North Carolina State University study, but the authors later said their work was being misrepresented and “has nothing in it that demonstrates that someone is deliberately trying to turn the elections.”
Second—after the Democratic National Committee predicted that, as a result of Google’s proposed program, “Donors will be harmed, and confidence in our democracy and its leaders will be undermined”—Democrats jumped all over the opportunity, and saw a dramatic boost in email engagement.
But that created an unforeseen problem, according to fundraisers. The rapid growth set them up for a major contraction.
So when Google announced it had decided to kill the VSP in late January, it was now mostly Democrats who found themselves unexpectedly in the spam bin.
Karin Roland, director of product at progressive digital fundraising house ActionKit, said her firm’s clients saw their email engagement on average double under the program. But when Google announced last call, clients got hit with a “post-VSP hangover.”
“After the program ended, campaigns saw increased spam reports, what we’ve called a ‘post-VSP hangover,’” Roland said. The hangover has begun to ease for some campaigns who have made proactive adjustments, she said, adding that it was “still way too soon to see the long-term effect.”
According to Pennington, the VSP had a vicious recoil. While it allowed campaigns to grow their lists and reach more donors—including in the critical weeks leading up to the midterms—its filter saw that growth with new eyes, and marked it as spam, when Google reverted to the norm.
“With emails, your reputation is built over time, as an address incrementally sends out a larger and larger list to people who open those emails and show that they want to receive them,” Pennington explained.
With the VSP, he said, people who would normally never engage with political emails were starting to open them. In some instances, emailers were seeing 10 times the previous engagement, according to Pennington.
“When you end the program and those emails go back to the promotions inbox, then those same people suddenly aren’t opening emails,” he said. When open rates drop suddenly, Google begins to see those emails as spam.
“The abrupt nature of it ending overnight with no phase-out caused the pollution of the data set of who’s an active user and who’s not,” he said. “I believe this was unintentional, but when you’re a monopoly then sometimes even unintentional things can have dangerous consequences.”
Reached for comment, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told The Daily Beast that the company was always clear about the end date.
“As we made clear from the beginning, the Verified Sender Program pilot would operate for a limited period ending on January 31st,” Castañeda said.
That’s not entirely accurate.
In its FEC request last July, the company wrote, “Unless the pilot degrades the user experience, Google intends to continue the pilot through January 2023 to be able to collect a meaningful amount of data to analyze. Again, Google may reconsider this approach if it receives indication that the program is harming the user experience.”
Castañeda also said that ahead of launch, Google “encouraged program participants to follow bulk sender best practices)" href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en__;!!LsXw!TD-5l0y_Y0PynDFiOErnzh8LDxSfpfjRX5mSOruzg1nGYoJJKF6ObYp84MIxsMTTztsbkX5LoSD3b-5SbtfCi34akIfIdG9m0A$"> best practices” and “cautioned)" href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://civicsresources.withgoogle.com/tools/gmail/lesson-2/__;!!LsXw!TD-5l0y_Y0PynDFiOErnzh8LDxSfpfjRX5mSOruzg1nGYoJJKF6ObYp84MIxsMTTztsbkX5LoSD3b-5SbtfCi34akIeUEpEp-g$">cautioned all bulk senders that spammy activity during the pilot would impact participants following the conclusion of the pilot.”
Today, Google claims the pilot program had “bipartisan” participation from more than 100 campaigns. But the company refused multiple times to describe that partisan breakdown. The company announced its decision to end the program in a court filing on Jan. 24, one week before its own tentative deadline.
For Middle Seat, Pennington said, the immediate consequences were “massive.”
“Email is the No. 1 way that small-dollar campaigns are funded by far,” he explained. Pennington shared internal data showing that since its creation in 2016, Middle Seat had raised more than $108 million through emails, more than through ads and websites combined.
Chelsea Thompson, general manager at NGP VAN, a leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations, said Google has an outsized influence on email outreach.
“Being spam-blocked by Google can crush large portions of your program. It’s a black hole,” Thompson told The Daily Beast. “With other email providers, you can write to them and explain your spam complaints and convince them to remove the spam flag, but Gmail doesn’t give you that option.”
“When Gmail tanks the amount of money you’re raising, that’s a big problem for our politics,” Pennington said, adding that the political problem gets worse when the affected groups are heavily indexed towards Democrats.
“If I were Google, I wouldn’t have done the program in the first place,” Pennington added. “If I’m a big corporation holding onto a monopoly, then I’m not getting involved in the political conversation.”
