Big Tech swore up and down that it treats every American the same.
Republican fundraisers suspected for years that something stank inside their supporters’ inboxes.
And now two university researchers put a dollar figure on it that will make Donald Trump’s blood boil.
The $117 Million Hole in WinRed’s Numbers
Dr Cameron Ellis of the University of Iowa and Dr Lars Powell of the University of Alabama went digging through itemized Federal Election Commission donation records. They separated first-time donors from repeat donors on WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform, and on ActBlue, its Democrat counterpart.
Then they tracked what happened to those donations during two stretches of spam filtering in 2025, according to the New York Post.
Their estimate is that Republicans lost 142,126 expected first-time donations. Using FEC data, the researchers put the value of those missing donors at $117 million.
The first stretch began June 30, 2025. That’s the day GOP consulting firm Targeted Victory told Google that WinRed fundraising emails were landing in spam. It ran through September 15, 2025, when Google dropped a spam blacklist called SURBL that the researchers say had improperly flagged the messages.
During that window, spam filtering cut first-time WinRed donations by 75 percent across Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.
The second stretch hit only Outlook. It ran from February through April 2025, and first-time WinRed donations dropped 83 percent.
“It’s a pretty big number,” Powell told the Post. “You can really think of that as an in-kind gift to ActBlue recipients.”
And he isn’t exaggerating the scale. The RNC, NRCC, and NRSC raised $377 million combined in 2025. The study’s estimate comes to almost a third of that.
Google Swears Its Filters Play Fair
Google came out swinging. A spokesperson said the study “relies on deeply flawed methodology that fundamentally misunderstands how Gmail works” and called the $117 million a theoretical estimate, not 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.
Microsoft declined to comment. Yahoo didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Powell didn’t pretend to know what goes on inside these companies. “We can’t read their minds,” he said. But he pointed to the evidence he does have. “Inbox placement data and paired email tests showed when the filtering happened and supported that WinRed links were the trigger.”
Those paired tests came from Targeted Victory, whose clients include US Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA), US Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Breitbart News reported that the firm sent identical emails through Gmail with one difference. Some carried a WinRed link. Others carried an ActBlue link.
Gmail flagged the WinRed emails as suspicious or dangerous. The ActBlue emails sailed right through.
And once Google stopped using SURBL, the researchers found that Republican email placement “normalized.”
The Donors Republicans Never Got to Meet
The dollar figure grabs the attention. But the more painful number is the 142,126.
Anybody who has ever raised money for a cause knows first-time donors are the seed corn. A campaign can always go back to the folks who already gave. The new donor is the one who gives again next month, signs up to volunteer, and tells his neighbor. A grandfather in Georgia who never saw the email asking for his first $25 never became any of those things.
So an estimate built on one year of data probably understates what Republicans actually lost, if the researchers have it right.
But here’s the part that ought to bother every American regardless of party. Ellis and Powell wrote that the mechanism “was observable only because private paired-test evidence leaked into public reporting.” Nobody outside these companies can see how the filters work. A consulting firm happened to run a test, and a memo happened to reach a newspaper. Without that, the whole episode stays buried.
That secrecy is the real story. A handful of mailbox providers decide what more than 3 billion Gmail users see every month, and they answer to nobody.
Conservatives have watched this movie before. Big Tech throttled dissent on COVID policy. Platforms suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks before the 2020 election. Each time, the companies insisted their rules were neutral, and each time the neutral rules landed on the same side of the aisle.
Maybe a third-party blacklist really did cause this by accident. Google says its protections apply equally, and the study doesn’t prove anyone inside the company meant to hurt Republicans. But an accident that only ever seems to break in one direction stops looking like much of an accident after a while.
NRSC press secretary Bernadette Breslin didn’t mince words. “Google’s biased algorithms sidelined Republican fundraising emails for years while boosting Democrats’ donor outreach,” she said.
One GOP adviser called the study a “massive proof point in what we already knew to be true.”
Google has now rolled out a “verified sender program” that lets political campaigns and PACs bypass Gmail spam filters as long as they stay “policy-compliant.” Breslin called it “a chance to level the playing field for online fundraising.”
Powell has a theory about why Google moved. “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.”
It’s a fair point, and a cynical one. And it leaves a question hanging. Google still writes the policy, and Google still decides who complies with it.
The same company that controlled the spam filter now controls the exemption from it. Republicans who take that on faith haven’t been paying attention.
Sources:
New York Post, “Email spam filters cost GOP fundraisers estimated $117M in donations last year: bombshell study,” September 28, 2026
Breitbart News, “Study: Google and Microsoft’s Politically Biased Spam Filtering Obstructed $117 Million in Fundraising for Trump & GOP,” September 28, 2026
Dr Cameron Ellis, University of Iowa, and Dr Lars Powell, University of Alabama, study of FEC donation records and spam filtering of WinRed fundraising emails