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Comment by roseway4 | Hacker News Reader

> As the election started to come to a crescendo in mid-October, and possibly as a result of the Trump campaign falling behind the Biden campaign in fundraising in early October, the Trump campaign began ramping up the cadence of contact to individuals, peaking at 26 mails per day. That’s not a typo: the Trump campaign on the eve of the election was mailing their respondents an average of 26 times per day.

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I think more remarkably though is that readers kept up the 10% reading rate, in contrast to Biden's 20%, so the total emails read ended up being much higher on Trump's part.

A possible explanation for the tactic of sending so many emails is that the subject header of Donald Trump's emails contained the message he wished to transmit, acting like an alternative news feed, similar to RSS or Twitter, bypassing the restrictions of the latter. In other words, recipients would not be required to open the email to get the message.

Indeed. I wonder, though, to what extent the daily read rate is a function of the contested nature of the election (as viewed by Trump supporters) vs the volume/ cadence of emails. It’s difficult to hold up the Biden campaign as a control given the different audiences.

> Based on open data, the average Biden campaign subscriber is now actually reading an email every other day; the average Trump campaign subscriber continues to read multiple emails per day.

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