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A few weeks ago, Texas Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw falsely claimed that at the center of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to tackle climate change and expand the nation’s social safety net would include Medicare for all.

It doesn’t and never will. Few people noticed, however, as Mr. Crenshaw hadn’t lied on Facebook or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the wrong message directly to the inboxes of his voters and supporters with a fundraising email.

Statements by lawmakers on social media and cable news are now routinely checked and scrutinized. However, e-mail, which is one of the most powerful communication tools that politicians can use and reaches hundreds of thousands of people, is full of unfounded claims and largely goes unnoticed.

The New York Times signed up in August to campaign lists of 390 senators and representatives running for reelection in 2022 and whose websites offered the option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns and tracked how common false and misleading statements were. Used to fill political coffers.

Both parties sent a lot of exaggeration in their emails. For example, a Republican said that Democrats wanted to establish a “one-party socialist state,” while a Democratic party suggested that the January 6 investigation was at imminent risk because the GOP could “force it to end the entire investigation early.”

But Republicans included misinformation much more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. Additionally, multiple Republicans often propagated the same baseless claims, while Democrats rarely repeated each other’s claims.

At least eight Republican lawmakers have sent fundraising emails that brazenly distort a possible deal with immigrants separated from their families during the Trump administration. One of them, Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, falsely claimed that President Biden “given $450,000 to every illegal immigrant who comes to our country.”

These allegations were based on reports that the Justice Department was negotiating payments to settle lawsuits that the Trump administration had separated, some of which were brought on behalf of immigrant families, who were not reunited. But the payments these are not final and may be smallerwill be limited to a small fraction of immigrants.

The relatively few misrepresentations by Democrats were mostly about abortion. For example, an email from New York Representative Carolyn Maloney said: Mississippi law before the Supreme Court “It was almost the same as in Texas banning abortion after 6 weeks”, but Mississippi law bans abortion after 15 weeks, not including law enforcement mechanism is a defining feature Texas law.

A spokesperson for Ms Maloney called the mistake an “honest mistake” and said the campaign would check future emails more carefully.

Campaign representatives for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Crenshaw did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Republican House and Senate campaign committees also did not respond to a request for comment.

Politicians have exaggerated and disguised since time immemorial, including in their email posts. But the volume, baldness, and reach of unsubstantiated claims have increased.

Emails reviewed by The Times illuminate how ubiquitous misinformation has emerged among Republicans, fueled in large part by former President Donald J. Trump. And misinformation doesn’t just come from, or even primarily, from the handful of people who’ve gotten national attention for it.

“The more extreme the claim, the better the response,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, the people behind the campaign emails. “The more resentful it unleashes, the more likely people are to donate. And it only contributes to the deterioration of our democratic process. It adds to the rudeness and immorality of political behavior.”

The messages also underline that despite all efforts to force platforms like Facebook and Twitter to address lies, many of the same claims are flowing by far from other powerful channels.

For fact-checkers and other watchdogs, “it’s hard to know what politicians are saying directly to individual supporters in their inboxes,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor in the Syracuse University School of Information Studies.

“Politicians know that too,” he said. “Politicians and the consulting firms behind them know that such messages are not followed to the same extent, so they may be more carefree about what they say.”

Email is a crucial tool for political fundraising because it costs campaigns almost nothing and can be extremely effective: When campaigns invest in it, it routinely makes up the majority of online fundraising. Supporters are bombarded, sometimes daily, with messages aimed at angering them, because strategists know that anger motivates voters.

In many cases, candidates have used outright outrageous misinformation in their donation requests. For example, Mr. Kennedy, who started the email declaring himself “crazy as a murder wasp” after his false allegation about payments to immigrants, said, “Prepare $500 to STOP ILLEGAL PAYMENTS!” Added a tagged link.

“I’ve been watching Joe Biden pay illegally to enter our country, and it’s all paid for by raising YOUR taxes,” he wrote. “We can’t let Biden give hundreds of thousands of dollars to every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to come into our country illegally.”

Several other Republicans, including Florida Representative Vern Buchanan, also claimed that the payments would go to all undocumented immigrants. Others, including Senator Todd Young of Indiana, squeezed the context inside emails with misleading subject lines like “BREAKING: Biden wants to pay $450,000 each for illegal immigrants for breaking our laws.”

Only eight of the 28 emails containing the $450,000 figure correctly contextualized it.

Campaign representatives for Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Young did not respond to requests for comment.

Another common thread was that the Justice Department targeted parents as “domestic terrorists” to challenge conservatives’ teaching of critical race theory, an advanced academic framework. using it as shorthand How some curricula cover race and racism, or alternatively to challenge pandemic-related restrictions.

“Parents are protesting a radical curriculum in public schools, and Biden wants parents to be labeled terrorists,” said an email from Kansas Representative Jake LaTurner. “Would you consider donating now to help us fight this heinous abuse of power?”

This misinformation echoed in emails from Mr. Crenshaw, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Young, Minnesota Representative Jim Hagedorn and New York Representative Elise Stefanik, attorney General Merrick Garland’s a memorandum on October 4 directing the FBI address threats to school personnel and school board members. (Some opponents of curricula and pandemic protocols sent death threats, vandalized homes and other acted threatening.) The note clearly differentiated between opposition and threats and did not call anyone a domestic terrorist. The Republican narrative combines this with a letter sent by the National Association of School Boards, an independent group, to the Department of Justice a few days ago.

Representatives of Stefanik and Mr Hagedorn said in the letter that the association was “coordinated” with the Biden administration, citing the latest news. These reports state that the school board association discussed the letter with the administration and added details about the threats at the administration’s request; They do not show that the Department of Justice approves of the “terrorist” label or criminalizes nonviolent opposition to curricula.

Campaign representatives for Mr. Crenshaw, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. LaTurner and Mr. Young did not respond to requests for comment.

Fighting misinformation in emails is difficult, both because the private nature of the medium and its targets are prone to believing it – but the fact that the recipients are already staunch partisans is diminished by Emily Thorson, a political scientist in Syracuse. The chance for misinformation to reach people whose views will be changed.

Professor Thorson said that unlike most misinformation on social media, these allegations came from people in authority and were spread over and over again. This is how the lies that the 2020 election was rigged gained traction: “Not because of random videos on Facebook, but because it was a consistent message that was echoed by many elites,” he said. “These are the ones we should be most worried about.”

Republican pollster Mr. Luntz conducts frequent focus groups with voters and said they tend to accept misinformation uncritically.

“This may be a fundraiser speech, but a lot of times people look at it as a campaign speech,” he said. “They think of it as context, they think of it as information – although it is, they don’t necessarily see it as fundraising. So attempting to separate them from their money is totally bad because you’re taking advantage of people who don’t know the difference.”