Beyond Direct Mail

Political candidates face the endless challenge of finding ways to communicate directly, substantively, and persuasively to the voting public. Growing numbers of candidates are offering electronic newsletters (candidate campaign e-mail messages) as political marketing instruments. This study content analyzed the candidate campaign email messages (N = 89) from the 2002 gubernatorial election in Florida (Jeb Bush and Bill McBride). Intercoder reliability was .98 across all 50 categories. Candidates were found to have mentioned personal qualities in 24.7% of the campaign e-mail messages, with Democratic candidate McBride mentioning attributes more frequently (32.6%) than Republican incumbent Bush (17.4%). More often than not, candidates omitted mention of their opponent in the e-mail messages. The present study found that 62.1% of the messages addressed the reader directly, with 50% of Bush's messages addressing the reader directly and 75.6% of McBride's messages doing so. There was a statistically significant increase of candidate campaign e-mail messages being sent during key campaign dates.