Gmail just nuked 142,000 campaign donations. They call it spam — we should call it unchecked power

The strongest response to conservative complaints about Gmail is not that the complaints are false, it is that the filtering is legitimate in practice. Security researcher Brian Krebs made that case recently, reporting that emails carrying WinRed donation links hit spam traps at roughly four times the rate of ActBlue mail in late July 2025. The claim rests on the belief that the filters were doing their job, reacting to sender behavior, with no political motivations. 

That argument leaves the more difficult issue untouched, namely, how much unaccountable power a few companies hold over political communication, and how little leverage the ecosystem has over them. 

Small-dollar fundraising, which is now the dominant channel in American federal campaigns, runs almost entirely through email. A campaign committee will send a solicitation, a supporter clicks a donation link, and the gift is processed by WinRed or ActBlue, the two primary online processors. The only step between outreach and a gift is a single URL. Whether that link reaches a possible supporter is decided by four consumer mailbox providers: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.

Read more at Washington Examiner.