Newsletters

There have been lots of posts recently about the Bush and Kerry email newsletters. Without talking about the actual effectiveness of the methods chosen, I think there is a reason why they chose the method they did. Bush had two reasons for focusing on asking recipients for action. First, the Bush campaign was never at a shortage for money, they had met their goals early in the campaign and never had to worry about primary opponents. Second, the Bush campaign had built an extremely strong grassroots operation and had plans and goals for them to accomplish and the ability to easily activate them. Kerry on the other hand, had trouble in both of these areas. While Kerry was able to raise money easily, he had a long way to catch up with Bush, and constantly needed money, hence all the emails raising money. Second, the Kerry campaign had an extremely poorly put together grassroots operation, instead the 527's and the DNC had taken over that aspect of the campaign. The Kerry campaign was then never had a real plan for them, nor did they want to step on the toes of the groups they couldn't legally coordinate with.