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McCain e-mail targeting grows, tone changes

Dante Chinni

Posted: 08.08.2008 / 7:39 AM PDT

Sometimes what a candidate doesn’t say can be just as important as what he does say – and that is as true in e-mail as it is in speeches.

When it comes to e-corresponding with supporters, the McCain campaign seems to be saying different things to different folks and at different rates. Some people are finding their mailboxes jammed with McCain messages. Others are hardly hearing from the Arizona senator at all.

The Obama camp is also showing more interest in some places than others. But on the whole, Barack Obama’s e-message machine seems steadier and more focused.

To monitor the messages the campaigns are sending and to whom, Patchwork Nation created e-mail accounts for pseudovoters in each of our 11 communities in February and signed up at the McCain and Obama websites.

This latest batch of e-mails shows the greatest evidence yet of message targeting by John McCain’s campaign, but it also shows targeting that is more primitive than the work of the Obama team.

One of the biggest surprises in the mailboxes of McCain supporters in Philadelphia; Sioux Center, Iowa; and Ann Arbor, Mich.: the lack of correspondence.

Since mid-July, our Philadelphia McCainiac has not received a single e-mail from the campaign. In that same period, the Philadelphia mailbox received nine e-mails from the Obama campaign and five from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and surrogates for her team (seeking to retire her campaign debt).

Over that period, the McCain campaign also did not send a single note to our supporter in Sioux Center and e-mailed our Ann Arbor supporter only once. Meanwhile, Senator Obama’s campaign sent eight messages to each of those e-mail boxes.

The lack of correspondence from Senator McCain is interesting because all three of those states – Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan – are thought to be battlegrounds in 2008. Although Philadelphia and Ann Arbor are liberal bastions that McCain might feel he can’t win anyway, Sioux Center is very conservative and will almost certainly go for him in November.

There are some supporters, however, who are getting a large dose of McCain e-mail.

Our McCain supporter in Hopkinsville, Ky., has received nine e-mails from the McCain campaign since mid-July.

In late July, the Hopkinsville box received an invitation to join “McCain Nation” – a “powerful online tool, built exclusively for our supporters across the country to plan events to help spread John McCain’s message.”

And there was more of a happily pugilistic and sarcastic tone to those emails than what we’ve seen in the past reflecting the larger change in the McCain campaign’s approach. The messages seemed to target more of a red-meat conservative crowd. That is to be expected: Hopkinsville, just up the road from the Fort Campbell military base, is Patchwork Nation’s “Military Bastion” community and is thought to be solidly behind McCain.

That email box was one of the only mailboxes to receive a link to the much-discussed “celebrity” ad (the one featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears). It also received a link to an ad called “The One” that mocks Obama as a messianic figure and features scenes from the film “The Ten Commandments.” (It was the campaign’s latest “fun video,” according to the email.)

Then there was the e-mail about receiving an “Obama Energy Plan” tire pressure gauge with a donation. McCain mocked Obama for calling on people to inflate their tires to save gas, before later relenting.

The McCain camp also filled mailboxes in Lincoln City, Ore. (Patchwork Nation’s “Service Worker Center” community), El Mirage, Ariz. (our “Immigration Nation”), and Nixa, Mo. (our “Evangelical Epicenter”) – with eight, six, and four e-mails, respectively. Nixa’s messages contained no “fun” e-mails, perhaps out of concern that a sarcastic tone might not play well in the community.

Over on the Democratic side, team Obama seems to have shifted gears a bit as well.

Many Obama e-mails now come from state and local people dealing with issues more specific to those voters – in Ann Arbor, an e-mail about Obama announcing his energy policy in Michigan; in Lincoln City, an announcement about “Oregon Neighborhood Action Day.”

Issue-targeting is still going on as well. Our Obama supporter in El Mirage, who the campaign believes is Hispanic, received a link to a page with a video called “The Latino Vote.”

The video, a message from Temo Figueroa, the campaign’s Latino vote director, explains how Obama wants to reach out to Latinos. It runs alongside a form that allows people to share the video and offers to load contacts from the user’s address book. It promises not to collect the addresses, making supporters more likely to share the video.

As the campaign goes along, the question is whether and how Obama will begin better mixing those local and issue e-mails into targeted messages that hit both areas of interest and locales.