A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden's domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation's social safety net, would include Medicare for all.
It never has. Mr. Crenshaw did not say it on Facebook or on Fox News. He sent a false message to his supporters in a fund-raising email.
Lawmakers statements on social media and cable news are fact-checked. Email is one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people.
The New York Times signed up for the campaign lists of 395 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022, who had websites that offered that option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers.
Both parties made a lot of hyperbole in their emails. One Republican said that Democrats wanted to establish a one-party socialist state, while another Democrat said the inquiry was at risk because the G.O.P. could force it to end early.
In about 15 percent of their messages, Republicans included misinformation, compared with 2 percent for Democrats. Multiple Republicans spread the same claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeat them.
The fund-raising emails contained a distortion of a potential settlement with migrants separated from their families during the Trump administration. One of them, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, claimed that President Biden was giving every illegal immigrant $450,000.
The claims were based on news that the Justice Department was negotiating payments to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of immigrant families who were separated by the Trump administration. The payments, which are not final and could end up being smaller, would be limited to a small group of migrants.
Democrats made a small number of false statements about abortion. An email from Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York said that the Mississippi law before the Supreme Court was nearly identical to the one in Texas, banning abortions after 6 weeks, but Mississippi's law doesn't include the enforcement mechanism that is a defining characteristic.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Maloney said that the campaign would check future emails more carefully.
Representatives for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Crenshaw did not respond to requests for comment. The Republican House and Senate campaign committees did not respond to the request for comment.
Politicians have exaggerated in their email dispatches. The reach of false claims has increased.
The emails reviewed by The Times show how pervasive misinformation has become among Republicans. The misinformation is coming from a lot of people, not just the few who get national attention for it.
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, said that the people behind campaign emails have "realized the more extreme claim, the better the response." People are more likely to donate if it elicits anger. It contributes to the perversion of our democratic process. It contributes to the indecency of political behavior.
Many of the same claims are flowing through other powerful channels with little notice, as the messages show.
It is hard to know what politicians are saying to individual supporters in their inboxes, said a professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.
She said that politicians know that. The politicians and the consulting firms behind them know that this kind of messaging is not monitored as much as they would like.
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The Democrats' budget bill included Medicare for all, according to an email from Representative Dan Crenshaw's campaign. Anna Moneymaker is a writer for The New York Times.
Email is a crucial tool in political fund-raising because it costs almost nothing and can be extremely effective: When campaigns invest in it, it frequently accounts for a majority of their online fund-raising. Supporters are bombarded with messages that make them angry.
In many cases, candidates used misinformation in their requests for donations. Mr. Kennedy included a link to a website to stop illegal immigrants after he made a false claim about payments.
He wrote that he was watching Joe Biden pay illegals to come into the country and it was all being paid for by raising taxes. We can't let Biden give out hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who want to come into our country illegally.
The payments would go to all the immigrants, according to Representative Buchanan of Florida. Others, including Senator Todd Young of Indiana, tucked the context inside emails with misleading subject lines.
Only eight of the 28 emails that included the $450,000 figure were accurate.
Representatives for Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Young did not respond to calls for comment.
The Justice Department was targeting parents as domestic terrorists for challenging the teaching of critical race theory, an advanced academic framework that conservatives are using as shorthand for how some curriculums cover race and racism.
Representative Jake LaTurner of Kansas sent an email saying that parents were protesting a radical curriculum in public schools and that Biden wanted the parents to be labeled terrorists. Will you consider donating now to help us fight back?
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A campaign email from Representative Elise Stefanik of New York claimed that the Justice Department was targeting parents for challenging the teaching of critical race theory.
The misinformation came from Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Young, Mr. Hagedorn, and Mr. Stefanik. Some opponents of curriculums have sent death threats and vandalized homes. The memo did not refer to anyone as a domestic terrorist. The National School Boards Association sent a letter to the Justice Department a few days before the Republican story was told.
The association coordinated with the Biden administration on the letter, according to representatives. The reports don't show the Justice Department endorsing the "terrorist" label or the criminalizing of peaceful opposition to curriculums.
The campaign representatives did not respond to the requests for comment.
The private nature of the medium and the fact that the recipients were likely to be partisans reduced the chances of misinformation reaching people.
Professor Thorson was concerned that these claims came from people with authority and were being spread repetitively, unlike much of the misinformation on social media. She said that the 2020 election was rigged because it was a coherent message echoed by a lot of elites. Those are the ones we need to be most concerned about.
Mr. Luntz said that voters tended to accept misinformation uncritically.
He said that it may be a fund-raising pitch, but people often look at it as a campaign pitch. They think of it as context, but they don't see it as a fund-raising activity. You are taking advantage of people who don't know the difference, because you are misleading them in an attempt to divide them from their money.
