A Tale of Two Emails Part II: Analyzing Joe Biden's Emails to His Supporters

It's been a bit more than 2 weeks since news outlets called the presidential race for President-Elect Joe Biden, which as a Biden supporter and donor to his campaign, is a huge sigh of relief. While other members of the government have yet to accept the results of the election, many states are certifying results, and it's only a matter of time before President-Elect Biden becomes President Biden. But how did we get here? Similar to last week's post, we're going to analyze the Biden team's emails to its supporters to see what changed between the final Presidential Debate, Election Day, and a week after the race was called.

Before we get into it, just a couple of editor's notes:

• I did donate to the Biden campaign, which may or may not have affected the number and type of emails I received
• The Word Clouds were done using Power BI, and I didn't really learn much in the last week
• I copied the data manually from my emails (110 from October 23 to November 15). So there is some inconsistency and potential human error.

Analyzing the Subject Lines

Here's a word cloud of the subjects of Biden emails from October 23 to November 3 (final presidential debate to Election Day):

Word Cloud from subjects of Biden emails: Oct 23 to Nov 3

Over these 11 days, Biden sent only 87 emails. The top 6 words in the subjects (excluding common words) are:

• Last: 13 occurrences
• Need: 8 occurrences
• Ask and Time: 7 occurrences
• Please and Today: 6 occurrences

Other than the irony of "Last" occurring the most times, there's nothing exception about the wording. There is a more soft and kind tone which is struck, maybe due to the fact that I've donated to the campaign previously.

Here's a word cloud of the subjects of Biden emails from November 4 to November 15 (same timing as the Trump emails analysis):

Word Cloud from subjects of Biden emails: Nov 4 to Nov 15

Over these 12 days, Biden sent only 33 emails (< 20% the number of Trump emails, which makes sense given that Biden was announced the winner in this span). Only 14 emails were sent after Nov 7, which was when nearly all news outlets named Biden the presumptive President-elect. The top 6 words in the subjects (excluding common words) are:

• Biden, Fight, Fund, and Need: 4 occurrences
• Asking and One: 3 occurrences

While unfortunate that Biden also created a fund to support the legal battles that Trump was waging (the Biden Fight Fund), there's no real surprises here either.

Analyzing the Bodies

Here's a word cloud of the bodies of Biden emails from October 23 to November 3:

Word Cloud from bodies of Biden emails: Oct 23 to Nov 3

The top 7 words in the bodies (excluding common words) are:

• Final: 180 occurrences
• Goal: 169 occurrences
• Make and Need: 163 occurrences
• More: 160 occurrences
• Joe: 139 occurrences (for reference, Biden came up 82 times)
• Election: 126 occurrences

As for names,  Donald came up 54 times, Trump came up 89 times, Kamala came up 81 times, and Harris came up 50 times. Again - a fairly banal set of words in the body which are to be expected from any campaign donation. Anecdotally, the emails also read a lot more passively compared to the Trump campaign emails (again, highlighting the relatively boring quality of the Biden run for presidency - or the "return to normalcy and decency").

Here's a word cloud of the bodies of Biden emails from November 4 to November 15:

Word Cloud from bodies of Biden emails: Nov 4 to Nov 15

The top 6 words in the bodies (excluding common words) are:

• Biden: 73 occurrences (the dynamic flipped from the previous set of emails as Joe showed up only 31 times)
• Fight: 64 occurrences
• Fund: 61 occurrences
• Trump: 43 occurrences (both as "Trump" and "Trump's")
• People: 42 occurrences (interestingly - Kamala Harris' presidential slogan was "For the People")
• Democrats and election: 41 occurrences
• Country: 39 occurrences

There's a clear highlight of the legal battles that were occurring at the time (legal came up 26 times and lawsuits came up 21 times), which was the primary use of the Biden Fight Fund. Biden's presidential win was also highlighted as victory occurred 18 times and president occurred 19 times.

What can we learn?

I think one of the biggest lessons here is that the Democrats ran a very vanilla campaign. There was nothing inspiring from Biden's emails, whereas Trump's emails showed a much clearer charisma. However, the Biden team also likely realized that the "return to boring politics" would be a benefit to his image as a uniting force in the country. It also showed the unprecedented legal challenges that had occurred over the past few weeks. There are still a number of Trump emails that come through regarding the election, and a number of lawsuits. The election is being litigated to a significantly more extreme degree than prior elections and it is laying the groundwork to undermine the legitimacy of our electoral process. As I said previously, we must continue to fight the misinformation that is coming from Trump's legal team and show that the election was legitimate.