Confessions of a Lifelong Democrat: Why Are Republicans So Desperate to Mail Me?

On a hot, muggy day in metropolitan Detroit in the mid-1970s, I reached the age of majority. With one eye on the 1976 presidential election and the other trying not to melt from the Michigan humidity, I marched into the local city clerk's office on the morning of my 18th birthday, filled out a voter registration form, took an oath administered by a city official, and became eligible to vote.

Over the last 50-plus years, my voting has been remarkably consistent. In every presidential election since 1976, I have voted for the Democratic nominee.

That isn't to say I haven't occasionally crossed party lines. I have voted for Republicans and independents along the way. Contrary to what cable news might suggest, split-ticket voting wasn't always considered an exotic lifestyle choice.

The most notable exception came in 1978 when I voted to reelect Republican Michigan Gov. William Milliken. A widely respected moderate, Milliken remains Michigan's longest-serving governor, serving from 1969 until 1983.

Toward the end of his life, he signed an amicus brief supporting same-sex marriage in 2015 and was eventually kicked out of the Traverse City Republican Club because he opposed fellow Republican Donald Trump. That's right - the man managed to get expelled from his own political clubhouse after nearly half a century. Politics has changed.

Over those same five decades, I've lived in several jurisdictions across four geographically diverse states. While I wasn't always registered as a Democrat, I was never registered as a Republican. Not once. Not accidentally. Not during a clerical error. Not after a head injury.

So it was with genuine curiosity that, beginning this year, I somehow started receiving campaign mailers from Republican candidates.

Before his first-place finish in California's gubernatorial primary, my name mysteriously appeared on Republican Steve Hilton's mailing list.

Since his primary success, I have received a nearly identical envelope containing a letter condemning Gavin Newsom, Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. As expected, the letter concluded with a convenient tear-off donation card and a postage-paid return envelope. Apparently, if you're going to denounce Democrats, you might as well make it easy for recipients to finance the effort.

Unlike most people who treat campaign mail as something to carry from the mailbox to the recycling bin in one uninterrupted motion, I actually read these things. It's an occupational hazard.

So I found myself asking: Why would a Republican candidate for California governor spend good money sending a fundraising appeal to someone who has spent the last half-century voting for Democratic presidential candidates?

Do they believe that a late-60s white Democratic voter is suddenly going to read one fundraising letter, slap his forehead and exclaim, "My goodness! Where have Charlie Kirk, Kevin Kiley and Donald Trump been all my life?"

Or perhaps the campaign has developed a sophisticated demographic model concluding that men approaching 70 wake up every morning with absolutely no memory of the previous 50 years. If so, I'd like to compliment them on confusing aging with the plot of Memento.

Then, just when I thought things couldn't get stranger, another envelope arrived.

This one bore the reassuringly alarming warning: DO NOT DESTROY. See both envelopes below.

Naturally, my first instinct was to destroy it.

But as a longtime collector of political oddities, I noticed the return address from the National Republican Congressional Committee. The official-looking envelope contained an "NRCC Every Member Canvas" questionnaire, along with a four-page letter from House Speaker Mike Johnson.

This mailing was even more perplexing because it arrived after California's primary election. In California's 7th Congressional District, the November ballot features...two Democrats.

So unless the NRCC has secretly endorsed one of them—and somehow neglected to mention it—this appears to be little more than an elaborate fundraising expedition.

Again, I wondered: What exactly is the strategy here? More importantly, how did I end up on this mailing list?

One clue may lie in the envelopes themselves. Both were addressed simply to "Dan."

On my voter registration, my legal first name is Daniel.

That suggests my information didn't come from voter registration records but from some commercially purchased mailing list floating around the political-industrial complex. Somewhere, someone apparently decided that "Dan" sounded persuadable.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is also the most plausible.

There is so much money sloshing through modern political fundraising that mailing consultants have concluded it's easier to carpet-bomb every mailbox in America than spend time figuring out who's actually likely to donate. After all, if someone else is paying for the postage, why let facts get in the way of a good fundraising campaign?

Besides, every unnecessary mailer means another consultant gets to bill another unnecessary invoice. Democracy may be priceless, but direct mail apparently is not.

In Part Two of this series, we'll examine perhaps the most entertaining piece of political mail yet: an ominous-looking "Eviction Notice" that recently landed in my mailbox.

Spoiler alert: I'm still living in the house.

Suffice it to say, these mailers appear to be driven less by sophisticated voter targeting than by a fundraising ecosystem in which political operatives are often more interested in maximizing consulting contracts than maximizing campaign efficiency.