Candidates make last-minute pleas for money

“I’ll be honest with you … I’m cheap,” wrote Rick Santorum, in an email Wednesday morning addressing the recipient by first name. 

{mosads}“There’s a downside to running a frugal campaign,” the former Pennsylvania senator and current struggling presidential candidate added. “Reality!” 

Santorum’s increasingly desperate pleas for money are commonplace in the last minute frenzy of donation begging from all presidential candidates as tonight’s midnight deadline approaches for the FEC’s third-quarter fundraising reports.  

Eager to intimidate opponents and encourage supporters with healthy fundraising totals, campaigns are bombarding their email lists with solicitations for donations of as little as $1. 

Over the past 24 hours, the Clinton campaign has issued pleas from national finance director Dennis Cheng, campaign vice chair Huma Abedin and several from Hillary Clinton herself.

Clinton’s personal solicitations range from a curt two-line note to an email running several paragraphs that connects Donald Trump’s description of her as “shrill” with an allegedly broader conservative assault on women. 

Clinton closes that email by saying: “Be ‘shrill’ with me — stand up, challenge the doubters, and say you’re not backing down from this fight. Chip in $1 or more …”

Jeb Bush has been using members of his famous family to haul in a final rush of cash. His father and brother, former Presidents George H.W. and George W.; his mother, Barbara; and son George P. have all sent out fundraising pleas on the former Florida governor’s behalf.

Begging for donations has become more of a science than an art in recent years, with digital tools allowing campaigns to test messages and messengers in real-time to find the combinations most effective at convincing supporters to hit the red “donate” button. 

President Obama’s former campaign manager Jim Messina gave an insight into how campaigns use “Big Data” to test and perfect these fundraising solicitations, when he spoke at the Milken Institute’s 2013 Global Conference. 

“We measured all the forms of persuasion against each other,” said Messina, referring to the 2012 Obama campaign. “We had 20 million people on our email list. … By the time you got that email, we had tested 24 different versions of it before we went to the whole list. 

“We tested how big the donate button was, who it was from, how big the font was, what the picture was.” 

The identity of the email messenger is crucially important, according to Messina. A competition for a “dinner with Barack” raised about $3 million every time the Obama campaign did it, he said. But when the campaign changed that email to “dinner with Barack and George Clooney,” they raised $12 million. 

In the 2016 fundraising emails, the most popular introduction appears to be “friend,” and most campaigns are employing familiar, even familial, tones to get money. 

Though several campaigns are taking a blunter tack.

The campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent an email Wednesday morning with the subject line: “The shortest email you’ll read.”  

The two-sentence note, above a large green “donate” button, reads: “I need your help ahead of tonight’s urgent fundraising deadline. Click here to donate now. — Marco.”

The blunt tone may have its limits. 

Those on the email list of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) were greeted earlier this week as “Prospective Christie Supporter.” 

Perhaps finding that its robotic greeting was not delivering as much money as it might, the Christie campaign has warmed things up considerably in recent days. 

Christie and his wife Mary Pat are now offering contributors of at least $3 a chance to enter a contest to join them to “grab a beer.”