So.Many.Texts.

Insights Into Political Texting

I actually haven’t voted yet but you should. Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash

For the past few months, I’ve been volunteering with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) by sending texts to eligible voters about candidates, volunteer opportunities, and voting information. I do it twice a week for about 90 minutes, and I thought I would share some thoughts about political texting. First, I’ll talk about some insights I’ve had while texting. Second, I’ll give you some tips for dealing with political text messages.

Insights and Questions

The datasets that we use vary tremendously but they aren’t random. The data is pulled from public records, such as a congressional district, and existing databases, like prior volunteers or people who have donated in the past to a Democratic candidate. Or maybe they have the phone number of someone who once lived in the district or donated to a candidate. The data is usually pulled by VAN or another database coordinator.

The text messages from the DCCC are sent manually by volunteers from a computer program that uses a phone number that is not owned by the volunteer. If you try to call that number, you won’t get anyone. In our case, we reply with a canned answer that we can’t speak by phone but are happy to have a text conversation.

When I do it, I can send out 2000 text messages in approximate 15-20 minutes, longer if I stop to do replies. In an hour, there might be 50 volunteers, so between 80,000-100,000 texts go out. Of those texts, we do not get a reply if it was a dead number, if the receiver replied STOP, or the receiver does not respond.

The number of responses we get really depends on the “ask” in the message, and there always is an “ask” or a “take action” request. We aren’t asking for money, although a lot of your political texts probably are. We are asking if you would like to go to a rally or town hall that candidate X is hosting, if you would like a yard sign, or if we can count on you to support candidate X. The rate of response is probably 2%. The rate of positive response is probably less than 1%. That’s fine though. If we invite 100,000 people to volunteer and only .5% say yes, that’s 500 volunteers, which would be an insane bounty of volunteers in a congressional race.

Recently, I worked on a set of inactive voter texts, where we asked voters who had been deemed inactive by the secretary of state whether they had moved or not. If they had moved, we would mark that in the data file and provide information on how to register in their new state (iwillvote.com). We definitely got a higher rate of return on this question; it felt closer to 10%. That might be an exaggeration, but SO many people had moved out of California. Most of them wanted to share their new location and wanted to share that they still plan to “vote blue.”

And here’s why I’m mildly hopeful about Kamala Harris’s chances in the swing states, Texas, and Florida: most of the CA Dem voters moved to those places. There were a couple of outliers like Oklahoma and Massachusetts, but the supermajority of CA voters had moved to PA, AZ, NV, GA, FL, and TX. Several had moved to Wisconsin and North Carolina.

Maybe all the non-responders moved to the swings states too, and plan to vote GOP. But the Blue voters in new states are very excited to vote, wanted voter information, and were happy to proclaim their support. And I wonder if maybe they aren’t showing up in the polling data because their phone numbers are associated with a voter file in CA. We’ll see. But I think the mass migration out of CA since 2020 will affect the vote in swing states.

Some other things I’ve noticed:

• lots of very old people are very excited to vote for Kamala

• If I’d been keeping track, I could probably guess which Democratic candidates will win their district (these are all red to blue races) based on whether we reached someone who knew them personally. About 50% of the time we did, and the person loved the candidate. That suggested to me that those candidates have name recognition and a good ground game.

• MAGA people will type really nasty shit in a reply text but regular old school GOP will usually just say that they vote Republican and then say God bless or something benign. There’s something extra about MAGA people; they lack filters or a sense of shame or something. It’s really weird.

• If you give feedback, it will go into the data file. So if it’s a wrong number, say so, and if you voted, definitely tell them.

Tips and Tricks for dealing with the texts you get

Some tips for dealing with political text messages:

• Read the text message to see what the “action” request is and decide how you want to respond.

• Reply STOP to stop texts from that particular sender. Only use STOP - the system will automatically process it and block them from sending to you again.

• don't put STOP!, F U!, STOP2QUIT, or MAGA - those don't work to trigger the automatic opt-out function. You have to hope a volunteer sees it and opts you out.

• Why are there multiple senders? Everyone pulls from the public voter file. That's at the state, federal, and local level, individual candidates, and individual PACs. Don't blame one sender for all the emails. They are only responsible for their own and you need to say STOP to each one.

• The texts will completely stop if you vote, so VOTE EARLY, and in a day or two, the texts will stop completely (or should) because the voter file will reflect that you are done.

• Voting early frees up resources for the candidates to use getting out the vote of less-engaged voters.

• If you have a specific message for the candidate or campaign, a volunteer will probably see it, at least if they are from DCCC. We have flags for a lot of issues. For example, anyone mentioning anything related to Israel-Palestine gets a flag and a message thanking them for sharing their opinion on the issue. Maybe someday we’ll have some good news there and everyone will get a text message about it. Who knows.

I hope you’ve found this helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. Please share with other people, especially people complaining about all the text messages they get!