Beyond Direct Mail

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Abstract
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 ...