GOP Campaign Committees Ask FTC to Investigate Gmail for Bias

The GOP’s House and Senate campaign committees are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate what they say are Google’s efforts to suppress conservative campaign emails to subscribers who use Gmail.

The demand from the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee represents the latest salvo in the GOP’s ongoing feud with tech companies, which conservatives have long accused of unfairly discriminating against conservative candidates and causes.

In a letter to FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, the committees’ top officials claimed that email providers – Gmail, in particular – have routed “a substantial number” of the groups’ emails to users’ spam folders. 

In doing so, they argue, party committees are deprived of “a critical channel for communicating essential election-related information that would aid voters in effectively casting their ballots.” They also argue that Gmail’s spam filters have taken a toll on the committees’ small-dollar fundraising efforts.

“Because every party committee also relies upon email to generate small-dollar fundraising, Google’s speech suppression also starves committees of revenue that could be spent on get-out-the-vote and voter assistance programs,” wrote Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the chair of the NRSC, and Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., the NRCC chair. “The cost of Google’s suppression should therefore be calculated not only in dollars never raised, but in votes never cast.”

The executive directors of the NRSC and NRCC also submitted a public comment to the FTC’s ongoing inquiry into whether tech companies censor content, claiming that Google “has weaponized its immense market power over email delivery to deliberately punish conservative groups and silence their political speech.”