Do those annoying political fundraising texts actually work?

Election years are full of uncertainty, but 2024 — with its major-party candidate switch — is exceptionally so. 

As we inch closer to Election Day more questions arise: What polls should I trust? What exactly are the poll numbers telling me? And what is up with all these texts I’m getting from campaigns, begging me for money? We answer those questions and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s go-to hotline for all your questions.

The panicked texts Anne and her friends are receiving, each one seeming more desperate than the last, have been a hot topic as of late in her group chat. Anne lives in Chicago and considers herself moderately politically active — she’s more likely to talk to her local alderman about housing than be active in a political party on the national level, yet the texts keep pouring in. 

“I am dying for somebody to do a deep dive about these unhinged text messages that we keep getting,” she says. “Do these actually work?”

It turns out, they do. According to Lloyd Cotler, the founder of Banter Messaging — a company that does text campaigns for progressive organizations — they get a lot of bang for their buck. “It’s partially because texting is so cheap. Each text is a couple of pennies,” he says. “A well-done text marketing program can be really good at fundraising.”

Banter is not in the business of fundraising; if you get a text from them, it’s more likely to be a call to action than an ask for money. But there are lots of other companies that do fundraising work. Often, these consultants are hired by campaigns and political action committees. 

According to Cotler, however, not all PACs are created equal. While some fundraise on behalf of candidates and causes, others give just a fraction of what they bring in to politicians, the rest going to overhead, padding the salaries of those running the PAC. 

How do they get away with this? And how do they get voters’ contact information in the first place? We answer all that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

How do we end up with these text messages? 

The campaign will get started with an agency. They will take either your existing supporters or they will buy data from folks. And then they’ll just kind of start texting.

And how exactly do they get your data in the first place? 

There are a few different ways, ranging from banal to nefarious. The most basic way is just buying your data. They’re just getting it from another campaign, or another PAC, or another agency who sells campaign donor data. That’s just kind of the regular course of business. 

So, they got your email because you signed up for something or they had your email when the candidate ran six years ago, but you never gave them more info. Then they do a data append and get additional info on you,  and then they start texting you from the phone number they got, which may or may not be accurate. That’s why a lot of people get messages that are addressed to somebody else. They can also get it from the voter file. 

And then the most nefarious way would be scraping [Federal Election Commission] data, which is very illegal, but only if you got caught. 

They can sell your information? That feels legally sticky.

It should be illegal. The real gross part is that the agency will work on behalf of multiple clients and facilitate the sale of the data between their own clients. So you’re getting, from the same agency, eight identical messages from eight different candidates because they’re just copying and pasting their stuff over and sending it to you over and over.

How do you know if the organization reaching out to you is legitimate or not?

It takes, like, a full day’s worth of research. The average person is totally unequipped to do it, to be honest. You first have to figure out who this is actually from. Then you’ve got to look at the PAC and who it’s supporting. Then you can go to FEC and look up the PAC or whoever it is from there. And then it still might not paint the whole picture.

A campaign or a PAC showing 80 percent of its money spent on overhead doesn’t tell the whole story because it could be that they’re just passing the money through to candidates directly. And so that would be legitimate. But you couldn’t tell that from an FEC report. It’s a lot of digging for people to do. Which is why I always tell people if you want to support a campaign, go directly to their website and make a donation. If you write a check, you will not get spam text messages for quite awhile.

What can people do to get these texts to stop? 

The first thing you can do is make sure you’re on the National Do Not Call Registry. That’s not going to do anything, but it does give you standing to file a Telephone Consumer Protection Act demand. 

Then I tell everybody the best thing you can do is start suing: Sending TCPA demand letters to folks who are texting you repeatedly if you are on the Do Not Call Registry is a really easy way to get them to stop because those TCPA fines are really expensive, so they will settle. 

Generally you will get paid and then you will stop getting those messages because they will start blacklisting your number. Anybody can do it. And the more people that do it, the bigger the damage is on the fundraising side, the more they will have to reexamine if this is a viable channel. 

You can also copy and paste the full text of the message and send it to 7726 — which spells out spam — and that directs it to the [Federal Communications Commission].

For this episode, I also spoke to Vox senior politics reporter Christian Paz about polling. You can check out the podcast for our full conversation, but an interesting piece that ended up on the cutting room floor was a rundown of the polling he trusts. Where are the different places he goes to look at the data?

His trick, he says, is to look at several different sources. Each of these polls, he says, use different methods from phone surveys to online appeals, “kind of canceling out a little bit of the error or uncertainty that they might get from just doing their polls one way or another,” he says. “That kind of variety makes your overall analysis and understanding of polls stronger.”

National Polling

New York Times/Siena College

Quinnipiac University 

ABC/Washington Post

The Economist/YouGov

Echelon Insights

Regional

Marquette University

Susquehanna Polling and Research

Suffolk University 

Ann Selzer 

Specific Demographics 

Harvard Youth Report

Univision

Telemundo

Split Ticket