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.”

The public comment claims that, with roughly 130.9 billion users, Gmail accounts for nearly 76 percent of the American email market. It also alleged that the NRSC and NRCC have “experienced inexplicably low inbox placement rates when attempting to send emails to users of Google’s Gmail service.” In 2024, it says, just 30 percent of NRSC emails were successfully delivered to Gmail users’ primary inboxes. The vast majority were routed to the intended recipients’ spam folders, according to the committees.

“Google’s speech suppression practices are detrimental to American democracy and should not be allowed to persist for another election cycle,” the comment from NRSC Executive Director Jennifer DeCasper and NRCC Executive Director Micah Yousefi reads.

An Ongoing Battle

José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said that the crux of the NRSC and NRCC’s allegations had already been litigated and dismissed, rejecting the notion that Gmail’s spam filters discriminate based on political ideology or affiliation.

“A bipartisan FEC and federal court each dismissed these old claims,” Castañeda said in a statement. “In fact, Gmail has the best spam filters in the business, keeping people safe & in control. They look at a variety of signals – like whether a user marks an email as spam – and apply equally to all senders, regardless of political ideology.”

The committees’ complaints align with what many Republican fundraisers have long argued: that conservative campaigns and causes are disproportionately singled out by email filters. Some GOP fundraisers expressed similar concerns after Apple rolled out new filters for its popular Mail app last year.

The letter from the NRSC and NRCC isn’t the first time conservatives have singled out Google for alleged bias in Gmail’s spam filters. The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit against the company in 2022 accusing Gmail of suppressing their emails. A federal judge dismissed that case in 2023, writing at the time that the RNC had not “sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith.”