Balgarianovinite.com
National party committees spent tens of millions of dollars on printing and mailing – much of which went to direct mail – during the 2024 election cycle, even as campaigns increasingly relied on digital tools to expand fundraising and voter outreach.
The Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee both spent more than $43 million on printing and mailing expenses last cycle, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of federal campaign filings. The parties’ House and Senate campaign arms also invested heavily, each spending more than $18 million. Committees typically use direct mail to persuade or mobilize voters ahead of an election or to solicit donations from supporters.
Because party committees do not always use specific descriptions for expenditures in their campaign filings, it is not always possible to determine which printing and mailing costs were explicitly for direct mail. While most of that spending was certainly tied to direct mail, the totals also include other printed materials, such as campaign literature distributed by volunteers.
The DNC has steadily increased its spending on printing and mailing over the past three presidential cycles, rising from about $31.3 million in 2016 to more than $44.5 million in 2024. Over the same period, its total spending grew from $346.6 million to $686.2 million. That increase, Democratic strategist Al Freedman said, likely reflects a broader rise in political spending since 2016, as well as higher costs for materials like paper and postage.
On the Republican side, such expenditures by the RNC have been more volatile, rising and falling with overall spending patterns – a trend some strategists say may reflect shifts in party control and strategy. In 2024, Donald Trump took over the RNC, replaced much of its leadership and reshaped its operations to align more closely with his campaign, potentially redirecting how and where money is spent.
Even as spending has increased, party committees are devoting a smaller share of their overall expenditures to direct mail. The DNC’s printing and mailing costs fell from 9 percent of total expenditures in 2016 to 6.4 percent in 2024, while the RNC’s declined from 20.2 percent to 11.2 percent over the same period.
Direct mail reaches older, high-turnout voters
Some campaign strategists say direct mail remains an effective way to reach and mobilize voters who may be less responsive to digital outreach. Along with newer tools, direct mail plays a distinct role in campaigns’ broader outreach strategies, particularly when targeting certain voter demographics.
Direct mail advertising is particularly effective at mobilizing older voters, who consistently turn out at higher rates than younger Americans, said Freedman, a senior vice president at Mercury Public Affairs.
“Large segments of the population still prefer physical materials,” Freedman said. “Older voters typically respond well to printed messaging, read campaign literature and check their mail daily, and so that’s certainly an important piece of the direct mail strategy.”
In 2024, 55 percent of voters who cast a ballot were 50 years or older, while those under 30 accounted for just 15 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.
Older Americans also play an outsized role in political fundraising. Retired individuals were the top donor “industry” for all six federal party committees in 2024, contributing a combined $426.3 million, according to OpenSecrets data.
They were also the top source of contributions to each committee individually — often by wide margins.
More broadly, retirees gave more than $1.4 billion, excluding donations to independent expenditure groups, across federal campaigns and political groups in 2024 – up from about $388 million in 2016. The increase may be partly attributable to the growth of online donation platforms over the last decade, since some platforms make “Retired” the default option when prompting donors to provide their employment information, potentially overstating retiree contributions.
Rodell Mollineau, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of ROKK Solutions, said those trends make direct mail a logical part of campaign outreach, as parties seek to diversify their media strategies and target voters who are more likely to vote and donate.
“If you think about digital ads, we believe that people saw the ad, but did they engage with it?” Mollineau said. “Did they look at it for more than two seconds or did they just scroll past it, versus someone who takes the time to open their mail and at least take a physical glance at it? That engagement is powerful, but only if you are a habitual mail reader, which gets to certain demographics and age ranges in this country.”
Freedman agreed, saying the “tactile” medium of a physical piece of mail “can be psychologically, subconsciously more trustworthy than a digital delivery,” particularly as some voters grow more wary of online fundraising messages and phishing-style tactics.
Direct mail is built to mobilize, not persuade
Direct mail remains central to voter turnout efforts, said Jesse Baldwin-Philippi, an associate professor at Fordham University, even as digital outreach has become a more effective tool for fundraising. Rather than serving as a primary persuasion tool, she said, mail is most effective at mobilizing people who are already politically engaged but less likely to vote on their own.
“The most useful people to send mailers to are people who like you but are for whatever reason less likely to turn out,” Baldwin-Philippi said. “It can serve as an actual reminder.”
That turnout strategy is closely tied to how party committees build and use their voter data. Baldwin-Philippi said direct mail remains effective because campaigns use voter files to target individuals, and those records map more reliably to physical mailing addresses than to digital contact information.
“What the parties have been really good at is having just really really great, robust, complex data about who to turn out,” she said. “Direct mail is actually still pretty good at the question of who to turn out.”
High cost, but measurable impact
That precision comes at a cost. For any direct mail campaign, the postage and shipping costs typically exceed the printing costs, says Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University. In 2024, more than half of the RNC’s printing and mailing expenditures – approximately $24.9 million – went toward shipping and postage alone, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of FEC filings.
Despite its cost, direct mail is a worthwhile investment to reinforce digital messages and “ensure that no stone is left unturned in terms of reaching out to voters,” said Panagopoulos, who has experience both advising campaigns and running for local office.
Because campaigns can track who responds to fundraising appeals, some strategists say direct mail can help gauge interest among voters who are harder to measure through other metrics.
“Direct mail is definitely more expensive than online, but it brings in small donor (less than $200) donations from middle America and can provide an accurate indicator of interest levels from voters who may not be accurately polled,” Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist, wrote in an email.
While direct mail costs more than digital outreach, it is generally less costly than traditional media buys, Baldwin-Philippi said.
Direct mail remains entrenched heading into 2026 and 2028
Michael Parkin, a political science professor at Oberlin College, said direct mail is likely to remain a staple of campaign strategy in upcoming elections, noting that campaigns and parties are often “change-resistant” and have little incentive to experiment with new tactics. The only campaigns that tend to innovate are long-shot candidates with little chance of winning, he said.
“If you’re a campaign that has a lot of money, you’d be a fool not to spend it, because you don’t want to have money in the bank and end up losing the election,” Parkin said. “If you do something different and end up losing, then people are going to say, ‘You’re an idiot. Why didn’t you just stick with the rule book?’”
Parkin said campaigns and parties are also incentivized to keep spending on direct mail because they maintain relationships with consultants who profit from it and encourage them to continue using the same tactics that worked in the past.
But Freedman said the most effective campaigns don’t rely on direct mail or digital outreach alone, instead treating the two as complementary tools designed to reinforce one another.
“A good campaign treats all their paid media platforms in a collaborative and symbiotic manner,” Freedman said. “At the end of the day, a good campaign’s paid mail is going to work in context with the digital advertising and the TV advertising, and all of those messages are going to be consistent across platforms.”
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