A Republican consulting firm is warning that Google’s Gmail platform is disproportionately flagging Republican fundraising messages as spam while allowing similar Democratic solicitations to reach inboxes.
In a memo to clients obtained by The New York Post, Targeted Victory – whose roster includes the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee – described the filtering pattern as “serious and troubling,” saying it continued as recently as June and July. The firm said emails containing links to the Republican fundraising platform WinRed were, “in many cases, sending them directly to spam,” while identical test messages with links to the Democratic platform ActBlue were “delivered without issue.”
“If Gmail is allowed to quietly suppress WinRed links while giving ActBlue a free pass, it will continue to tilt the playing field in ways that voters never see, but campaigns will feel every single day,” the memo said. Video demonstrations of the firm’s testing were included.
The allegations come despite previous scrutiny of Gmail’s email filtering practices. In 2023, the Federal Election Commission dismissed a Republican National Committee complaint alleging political bias in Gmail’s spam algorithms. A year earlier, a federal judge dismissed an RNC lawsuit making similar claims.
Critics, including President Donald J. Trump, have long accused Google of political interference, alleging that the company has manipulated search results to disadvantage Republicans and, in one instance, suppressed news of an assassination attempt against Mr. Trump. In March, Elon Musk wrote on social media that Google had interfered “to help Democrats thousands of times every election season.”
Google has denied wrongdoing. “Email filter protections are in place to keep our users safe,” José Castañeda, a company spokesman, said in a statement Wednesday. “They look at a variety of signals – like whether a user has previously marked an email as spam – and apply equally to all senders, regardless of political ideology.”
Research has previously identified differences in filtering. A 2022 study by North Carolina State University found that Gmail flagged 59 percent more Republican fundraising emails as spam than Democratic ones during the lead-up to the 2020 election. “We observed that the [spam filtering algorithms] of different email services indeed exhibit biases towards different political affiliations,” the researchers wrote at the time.
According to the Targeted Victory memo, the firm first contacted Google about the issue on June 30 after receiving complaints from clients. Google, the memo said, initially “deflected” the concern by “blaming local settings” for the filtering behavior.
The firm’s tests involved sending identical emails to Gmail accounts, with the only difference being a WinRed or an ActBlue donation link. “The only difference between the two emails was the link,” the memo said. “ActBlue delivered. WinRed got flagged. That is not a coincidence.”
“This held true even for major accounts, including Trump and Elise Stefanik links, compared to DNC links,” the memo continued. After what it described as weeks of back-and-forth, Google’s support team acknowledged that WinRed links were deemed “suspicious” and, in some cases, flagged with a red banner warning that the message was “potentially suspicious or unsafe,” according to a screenshot dated July 22.
“This should alarm every campaign and committee that relies on email to connect with voters,” the memo concluded.
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