Election years are full of uncertainty, but 2024 — with its major-party candidate changes — is exceptionally so.
As election day approaches, the question arises: Which vote should I trust? What exactly are the poll numbers telling me? And all these texts I’m getting from the campaign, what do I have to beg for money? We answer those questions and more in this week’s episode explain meVisit Vox’s hotline for all your questions.
The panicked texts Ann and her friends are getting, each one seeming more desperate than the last, have been a hot topic of late in her group chat. Anne lives in Chicago and considers herself moderately politically active—she’s more likely to talk about housing with her local alderman than to be active in a political party at the national level, yet the texts keep pouring in.
“I’ve been dying for someone to do a deep dive on these random text messages we keep getting,” she says. “Do they actually work?”
Turns out, they do. According to Lloyd Cutler, founder of Banter Messaging — a company that does text campaigns for progressive organizations — they get a lot of bang for their buck. “That’s partly because texting is so cheap. Every text is a few pennies,” he says. “A well-done text marketing program can be really good at fundraising.”
Banter is not in the fundraising business; If you get a text from them, it’s more likely to be a call to action than a request for money. But there are many other companies that do fundraising. Often, these consultants are hired by campaigns and political action committees.
According to Cutler, however, not all PACs are created equal. While some fundraise for candidates and causes, others give a fraction of what they bring in for politicians, padding the salaries of the rest who run PACs.
How do they get away with this? And how do they get voter contact information in the first place? We answer all that and more in this week’s episode explain me.
Below is a portion of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
you can listen explain me on Apple Podcasts, Spotifyor Wherever you find podcasts. If you would 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 operation will be started with an agency. They will either take your existing supporters or they will buy data from people. And then they’ll just kind of start texting.
And how exactly do they get your information in the first place?
There are a few different ways, from the banal to the sinister. The most basic way is to just buy your data. They’re just getting it from another campaign, or another PAC, or another organization that sells campaign donor data. This is just the regular course of business.
So, they got your email because you signed up for something or they had your email six years ago when a candidate ran, but you didn’t give them more information. Then they add a data and get additional information about you, and then start texting you from the phone number they got, which may or may not be correct. This is why many people receive messages that are addressed to someone else. They can also get it from the voter file.
And then the most disgusting way will be scraping [Federal Election Commission]data, which is very illegal, but only if you get caught.
Can they sell your information? That feels legally sticky.
It should be illegal. The real gross part is that the agency will act on behalf of multiple clients and facilitate the sale of data between their own clients. So you’re getting eight identical messages from the same agency, from eight different candidates because they’re just copying and pasting their stuff and sending it to you over and over again.
How do you know if the organization you are reaching out to is legitimate?
It takes, like, a full day’s worth of research. The average person is completely unprepared to do this, to be honest. You first need to find out who it actually came from. Then you have to look at the PAC and who it is supporting. Then you can go to the FEC and see the PAC or whoever from there. And then it still doesn’t paint the whole picture.
That a campaign or a PAC spends 80 percent of its money on overhead doesn’t tell the whole story because it could be that they’re funneling money directly through candidates. And so that would be valid. But you couldn’t tell that from an FEC report. It’s a lot of digging for people. That’s 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 won’t get spam text messages for quite a while.
What can people do to stop these texts?
All you can do is make sure you’re in it Do not call the National Registry. It’s not going to do anything, but it gives you standing to file a Telephone Consumer Protection Act claim.
Then I tell everybody what you can do is start suing: sending TCPA demand letters to people who are texting you repeatedly is a really easy way to stop them if you’re on the do not call registry because those TCPA penalties are really. Expensive, so they will last.
Usually you pay and then you stop getting those messages because they start blacklisting your number. Anyone can do it. And the more people do it, the more damage there is to fundraising, the more they have to re-examine whether it’s 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 have it pointed to [Federal Communications Commission].
For this episode, I also spoke with Vox senior politics reporter Christian Paz about the polls. You can check out the podcast for our full conversation, but one interesting segment that ended up on the cutting room floor was a roundup of his vote of confidence. Where does he go to see the data in different places?
His joke, he says, is to look at different sources. Each of these polls, from phone surveys to online appeals, uses a variety of methods, “to eliminate some kind of error or uncertainty that they might get from casting their votes one way or another,” he said. “Such diversity strengthens your overall analysis and understanding of the poll.”
National polls
New York Times/Siena College
Quinnipiac University
ABC/Washington Post
The Economist/YouGov
Echelon Insights
regional
Marquette University
Susquehanna Polling and Research
Suffolk University
Anne Selzer
Certain demographics
Harvard Youth Report
Univision
Telemundo
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