A newly published study estimates that Republican fundraisers lost $117 million last year after email providers, chiefly Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, inappropriately flagged GOP fundraising messages as spam while allowing Democrat fundraising emails through.
The New York Post reports that the study, authored by Dr. Cameron Ellis of the University of Iowa and Dr. Lars Powell of the University of Alabama, uses itemized Federal Election Commission (FEC) donation records to seperate first-time donors from repeat donors across the Republican platform WinRed and its Democratic counterpart ActBlue, then tracked how donations moved during two stretches of spam filtering last year.
The first stretch ran from June 30, 2025, when the GOP consulting firm Targeted Victory told Google that WinRed fundraising emails were landing in spam, through September 15, 2025, when Google dropped a spam blacklist called SURBL that the researchers say had been improperly flagging the messages. During that window, spam filtering cut first-time WinRed donations by 75 percent across Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo. The second stretch, affecting only Outlook, ran from February through April of last year, and saw first-time WinRed donations drop 83 percent. Together, the two periods cost Republicans 142,126 expected first-time donations, which the researchers converted into $117 million using FEC data.
“It’s a pretty big number,” Powell told the Post. He said the loss doubled as a gift to the other side. “You can really think of that as an in-kind gift to ActBlue recipients.”
Ellis and Powell wrote that “a narrow, link-level placement decision by a small number of mailbox providers produced a measurable and economically meaningful drop in political fundraising, and that the mechanism was observable only because private paired-test evidence leaked into public reporting.” Powell was upfront about the limits of studying a system companies keep opaque. “We can’t read their minds,” he said, but pointed to other evidence pinning down the cause: “Inbox placement data and paired email tests showed when the filtering happened and supported that WinRed links were the trigger.”
Email placement for the GOP, the researchers found, “normalized” once Google stopped using SURBL on September 15.
For scale: RNC, NRCC and NRSC fundraising totaled $377 million combined in 2025. Gmail has more than 3 billion monthly users.
Google pushed back hard. A spokesperson said the study “relies on deeply flawed methodology that fundamentally misunderstands how Gmail works” and called the $117 million figure a theoretical estimate rather than a real-world number. “Our spam protections apply equally to everyone, regardless of political affiliation and we encourage bulk senders to follow best practices to reach inboxes,” the spokesperson said, adding that “people are in full control of their inboxes, with the power to mark messages as spam, block senders, or unsubscribe at any time.” Microsoft declined to comment. Yahoo did not respond to a request for comment.
Breitbart News previously reported that GOP consulting firm Targeted Victory revealed in 2025 that Google was flagging conservative fundraising emails as “dangerous:”
The New York Post reports that a recent memo from consulting firm Targeted Victory has revealed that Google’s Gmail service has been flagging Republican fundraising emails as spam, often sending them directly to users’ spam folders. The memo, obtained exclusively by the Post, suggests that this issue has been ongoing throughout the summer months of June and July.
Targeted Victory, whose clients include prominent Republican figures such as Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), as well as the National Republican Senatorial Committee, conducted tests to investigate the issue. The tests involved sending identical emails through Gmail, with the only difference being the inclusion of either a WinRed donation link (a Republican fundraising platform) or an ActBlue link (a Democratic fundraising platform). The results showed that emails containing WinRed links were consistently flagged as suspicious or dangerous, while those with ActBlue links were delivered without issue.
Google changed Gmail’s settings that August. A new “verified sender program,” letting political campaigns and PACs bypass Gmail spam filters as long as they stay “policy-compliant,” takes effect Tuesday. Powell said he has had no contact with Google about the study’s findings, but he had a theory for why the company changed course anyway. “They make money by having people send more emails. If people start changing, that’s bad for their business model,” he said. “I think that’s when we find out whether they’re more blue or green.”
Bernadette Breslin, press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said, “Google’s biased algorithms sidelined Republican fundraising emails for years while boosting Democrats’ donor outreach.” She added, “The NRSC has helped lead the investigation into Google’s suppression of mail to conservative subscribers, and this long-overdue update is a chance to level the playing field for online fundraising.”
A GOP adviser who has followed the spam filter issue called the study a “massive proof point in what we already knew to be true,” and a “smoking gun that con[firms]” the pattern.
Read more at the New York Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.
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