It’s not just you; the entire country is being bombarded with political text messages. The numbers are astronomical, and they show no signs of letting up before voters go to the polls next month.
Anyone who’s found themselves on a political party or campaign’s text-messaging list will attest to the fusillade of fundraising appeals to which they’re subjected. The wave can be measured by the persistent buzz of your phone, or chime alerting you to another message in your inbox. But hard macro data on the scale of America’s political text campaigns has been hard to come by. That’s changing with the release of numbers from RoboKiller, a leading service to combat unwanted robocalls and text-messaging spam.
According to RoboKiller data, Americans received an estimated six billion text messages related to the presidential election alone from June through September. And the volume of texts from political campaigns, parties, and interest groups increased substantially over that time. The 2.7 billion political texts that Americans got in September was nearly six times what they’d received three months earlier.
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RoboKiller is a project of a company called TelTech, which is owned by The Daily Beast parent company IAC. The company uses artificial intelligence machine-learning to track and weed out unwanted spam phone calls and text messages. Its aggregate numbers are extrapolated from the sample size that RoboKiller’s customers provide, meaning those numbers are informed estimates. They nonetheless provide the most comprehensive look to date at the sheer scale of text-message campaigns by both commercial and political advertisers.
While robocalling and mass-texting are well-worn marketing tactics, political campaigns are embracing texting to a far greater degree than in past election cycles. Part of that is a product of the coronavirus pandemic, which has limited the ability of campaigns to organize and contact voters through more traditional methods. But campaigns have also found text messaging to be particularly effective tools in their own right, as they’ve become an increasingly popular method of peer-to-peer communication.
“Political texts are not new for RoboKiller, and many Americans are probably used to receiving political robocalls during election season,” said Giulia Porter, RoboKiller’s vice president of marketing, in an email to PAY DIRT. “However, this year, we have noticed a huge increase in political text messages from campaigns.”
By law, automated text messages can only be sent to people who have agreed to receive them. In politics, that often means that someone put his or her phone number on their voter registration form, volunteered it in an online petition or donation page, or otherwise offered it up to the campaign texting them. But campaigns have found ways to expand their text-messaging list in other ways. It’s common for campaigns to buy or rent lists of cell numbers from others, and sometimes it can be difficult to determine how you ended up receiving messages from a particular campaign or party committee.
“One of the major trends fueling political text messaging is Peer-to-Peer texting, which allows a person to send mass amounts of texts to large groups of people at once,” Porter wrote. “Since these messages are not from an autodialer, it removes the need to obtain prior consent to send these messages. Regardless of how campaigns send these text messages, it is clear that Americans do not want to receive them. On average, 8 out of 10 RoboKiller users are marking these as spam or unwanted.”
President Donald Trump’s re-election effort and its allies in the Republican Party’s various campaign organs have embraced mass-texting as a fundraising tactic to such a degree that even the party’s own activists have publicly griped about the volume and tone of the constant dollar asks hitting their phones. And while the tactic is by no means limited to the GOP side, RoboKiller’s data indicates that Republicans are trouncing the opposition when it comes to mass-texting programs.
From June through September, RoboKiller estimates that Republicans sent roughly 4.1 billion text messages, compared to Democrats’ 1.8 billion. In all four of those months, GOP campaigns, party committees, and allied political groups more than doubled the opposition in the number of texts they sent, according to RoboKiller’s data. In July, they more than tripled Democratic texting efforts.
That data tracks with numbers provided by RoboKiller on some of the specific terms that have popped up most frequently in political text messages this year. Mentions of “Trump,” for example, far outpace “Biden,” with 4.4 million texts from June through September name-checking the president compared to 1.3 million for his Democratic challenger. (The single text received by the most people during that period, however, was from the Biden campaign, according to RoboKiller data; it previewed Wednesday’s debate performance by his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris.)
Keywords that have received the most political text-message play also suggest a heavy skew toward Trump and the GOP. Americans received more than 700 million political text messages during that four-month period using the words “riot” or “antifa,” for instance. Those on the receiving end are, by now, quite familiar with the formulation.
“Do you stand AGAINST Biden & Antifa?” asked a typical Trump campaign text message. “We’re sending a list of donors to Pres. Trump in 3 HRS. Will he see your name? 8X-MATCH LIVE! Donate here.”
Among the terms we asked RoboKiller to query for us, the most popular—perhaps unsurprisingly—was coronavirus. More than 900 million political texts from June through September included the words “COVID” or “coronavirus.” One example from the group End Citizens United declared, “Trump knew how deadly COVID-19 was and lied to the public about it. ANSWER: Are you voting for Trump?” A link in the text message asked recipients to complete a survey, then donate to the group.
Though less frequent by comparison, other more obscure—and occasionally conspiratorial—issues have found their way into Americans’ text-message inboxes millions of times. More than 1.5 million political texts from June through September mentioned George Soros, the liberal billionaire and perennial right-wing boogeyman. About 800,000 used the term “witch hunt.” Nearly 36 million mentioned China, with a sample Trump campaign text linking to a website hyping Biden’s ostensible ties to the Chinese government as well as his supposed lack of “mental fortitude.”
RoboKiller data also reveals that both parties are engaged in extensive robocalling, or automated phone calls that generally feature recordings of candidates or top party officials. There too Republicans are far outpacing Democrats in the volume of voter outreach. From June through September, the GOP made an estimated 231 million robocalls compared to Democrats’ 86 million.
But political operatives of both parties generally agree that texting is the future of digital campaigning. And that means a heavy reliance on the sorts of texts that have bombarded voters heading into November’s election.
Your phone, in essence, has become the frontlines of the election. And freeing yourself from the barrage of urgent-sounding political appeals can be a task. “Can you unsubscribe from political robocalls or text messages?” an FAQ section on the RoboKiller website asks. “The short answer is yes. The long answer is not easily.”
