Campaign Texts Reach Most, Annoy Some Ahead of Election

As the pandemic has hindered the allowances of canvassing and physical outreach, presidential campaigns have demonstrated an increased reliance on the virtual world to engage voters for the 2020 election.

Peer-to-peer texting, or P2P, has become a prevalent tool for political campaigns to reach thousands of people by text at a time, especially in states of high voting importance.

What was a practical tool in the 2008 Obama and 2016 Sanders campaigns has transformed into an essential one for the 2020 race, but many Americans are expressing frustration at the frequency at which they are receiving texts.

Veterans of the Sanders campaign created ThruText, a software that enables volunteers from progressive political campaigns to input a customizable script and track potential voter data from text survey responses.

ThruText’s host website, GetThru, boasts its partnerships with more than 1,000 campaigns, including WisDems and Biden for President, and over 250 million texts sent since 2016.

Will Larkins, a highschool student from Florida, is a volunteer for the the Biden campaign who uses ThruText to contact hundreds of potential voters in Michigan each week. He obtains polling data for the battleground state by texting scripted questions about candidate preference and sending policy information about Biden to people who may be undecided.

“I think a good number of people get registered or shift their political ideologies because of us, which may be a good or a bad thing, but either way is helpful for our agenda,” said Larkins.

This year has seen an exponential increase in the use of campaign texts, with an estimation of almost 3 billion political texts having been received before the November 3rd election, according to a political insight tracker from iPhone app RoboKiller.

Swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin are hit with floods of campaign texts, as consolidating polling information and solidifying voters’ understanding of absentee ballots in these states is crucial, according to a Pew Research publication.

But not everyone feels campaign texts are helpful in motivating voters to participate. A Twitter thread started by @kyokyle highlights the annoyance many potential voters have felt in the past few months toward the influx of political texts from various campaign teams and parties.

https://twitter.com/kyorkyle/status/1316431253671948288?s=10

Some commenters expressed confusion about the legalities of using personal phone numbers that weren’t given to campaigns with consent, and of the ability of organizations to bombard the inboxes of mass amounts of people.

The P2P Alliance, formed in 2016, lobbied to the FCC to ensure mass texting would be legal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits autodialed and unsolicited “robocalls.”

The definitions of these actions in reference to phone calls, however, have shifted since the TCPA’s origins in 1991, allowing third-party texting apps like ThruText, Hustle and RumbleUp to disseminate large numbers of texts with the stipulation that a human is doing the sending.

Phone numbers for P2P texting are usually obtained from voter registration records, which in most states, are freely accessible to anyone in the public.

“Since most people don’t update their registration information that often, we get a lot of wrong, old or changed numbers, which is good for our polling numbers, but I understand can be extremely annoying,” said Larkins.

Larkins says some recipients have expressed their frustration directly toward the volunteers, texting or calling back with obscene language or rage referring to P2P as “harassment.”

“You can send STOP and we legally have to stop, but there are so many teams doing so many different things from so many different political parties,” said Larkins. “Yelling at us isn’t going to help.”

Illinois-registered voter Andre Clavelli has been barraged by texts almost every day from all over the political spectrum, but hasn’t interacted with any of them.

“I delete them right after I get them,” said Clavelli. “It’s annoying, nothing is going to change my mind.” 

Larkins says text campaign messages are meant to act more like advertisements than weapons of persuasion, sending hints of the importance of voting and democracy so that they always remain part of the conversation.

“The constant reminders, as annoying as they might be, are still planting seeds of ideas in people’s heads, which is the goal of campaigning,” said Larkins.

The capability of P2P texting to promote higher engagement than other forms of virtual campaigning was measured by Gartner in 2016, who found that texts are opened as much as 98% of the time, while emails have open rates at only about 20%.

Campaign texting efforts may be criticized by those who believe their presence is too overwhelming, but the power of P2P lies might lie in its very ability to be an effective tool of mass information circulation, even if the information is getting ignored.

A first-time Wisconsin voter, Kayla Hazen has been receiving a mix of personalized and automated texts, all of which she didn’t realize were being sent by a real person.

“If I knew they were from real people then I would pay more attention,” said Hazen. “The fact that they took the time to send them out, I definitely would’ve asked for more information.”

On the other side of the screen, the real people are unpaid volunteers just trying to encourage civic participation.

“When so many things are going on right now to push people away from voting, it is our job to help get people involved,” said Larkins.