In his campaign, Senator Ted Cruz fomented a strong, visceral opposition to fellow candidate and now-nominee Donald Trump. In doing so, he built up a list of 280,000 donors on file and 1.2 overall email addresses.
Those same people have found themselves the recipient of many a Donald Trump email, according to Politico.
Even in the most contentious primaries, the end game almost always involves the Presidential nominee renting the lists of those he defeated. For the victor, it’s important to solidify your base, especially if your vanquished opponents have been especially critical of you in the primary. For the defeated, it’s a moneymaking opportunity that can be banked for future campaigns.
Per Politico:
Robert Graham, a cyber security expert who donated $10 to most of the presidential candidates early in the 2016 cycle and created separate email accounts for each donation to track how the campaigns shared his email address. Graham provided POLITICO access to his Cruz-list email records, which is the source of Trump-rented emails cited above.
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The exact details of Trump’s financial arrangement with Cruz are unclear, and loose federal record-keeping makes it impossible to verify. But an email rate sheet obtained by POLITICO shows that Cruz asks campaigns to pay more than $22,000 for the right to send a single email his list of 280,000 digital donors. He charges more than $51,000 to ping his full email file of 1.28 million supporters. Because Trump has rented Cruz’s list so often, he is almost surely receiving a negotiated discount from the list price, industry veterans say.
