William Mayer, 34, has reached his limit.
The incessant pinging of his cell phone is driving him up a wall. He already knows who is hitting his line.
“My mother doesn’t text me as much as Donald Trump’s campaign and Kamala Harris’s campaign has texted me,” the Philadelphia public school educator said.
Door knocking, emails and phone calls have been a consistent tactic for political campaigns and nonpartisan get out the vote (GOTV) efforts for quite some time. However, the superfluous text messages have drawn the ire of swing state voters this cycle, especially in Pennsylvania.
Brittany Crampsie, principal of Brit Crampsie Communications, said these voters aren’t making it up.
“There are more text messages in this cycle than in any previous — but this is kind of a new tactic from campaigns,” said Crampsie, who handles campaign and advocacy communications.
Mayer, who was in college during the 2008 United States presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain, said he never got this many texts asking for donations and his support then.
“I feel like Beyoncé in Destiny’s Child like — ‘you make me want to throw my pager out the window.’ Like stop calling me. Stop texting me. Stop sending me emails. Please, leave me alone. I get it. I’m going to vote,” Mayer said, quoting “Bug a Boo.”
Stacy Riggins, 57, a program coordinator at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, said she, too, is getting text messages several times an hour. She called it “overwhelming” and disruptive to her work day.
“Your phone is going off over and over and over,” Riggins said. “You don’t know if it’s an emergency or not and then when you look at it, it’s all messages from the campaign.”
She often deletes them.
“These text messages are actually more irritating than anything. They don’t change how I feel, who I would vote for or anything like that,” Riggins said.
The methodology behind the text message madness
Crampsie remembers meeting with a vendor eight years ago to discuss SMS communications as a tool for political engagement.
As part of that pitch, the vendor asked Crampsie and others to take out their phones and see how many unread emails they had and compare that to the number of unread texts.
“People aren’t deleting texts in the same way that they’re deleting emails and so it was a really quick, inexpensive way to get a little bit of text, a link and a photo to voters that’s going to be read at a higher rate than email,” Crampsie said. “However, everyone realized this and now everyone does it.”
Voter files aren’t hard to come by. The data that campaigns dig up don’t reveal who you vote for, but it will tell them how frequently you vote, where you live — and your phone number.
She said she’d be shocked if a voter from a targeted demographic or district received fewer than five texts a day. Crampsie, who previously worked as a press secretary for the Pennsylvania Senate Democrats, has even gotten messages about the U.S. Senate race in Texas.
“There’s a lot at stake in all of these races and I think campaigns are willing to do and use whatever tools are in the toolbox to contact voters and texts are inexpensive. Buying cable and buying broadcast [ads] is very expensive,” she said. “Sending a text message is going to run you a couple of cents per person.”
For nonpartisan GOTV efforts, Crampsie said research shows that if somebody commits to vote and makes a plan to vote, they are more likely to do it. Well-targeted election information — polling locations, hours and mail ballot reminders — are valuable to text, Crampsie said. The calculation to send a message is easy.
Mayer just wants campaigns and voter organizations to know that the message has been received.
“Y’all are just texting me without permission. Get permission and then send less text messages than my family sends,” he said.
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