When private companies flood your phone with unsolicited text messages, it is generally considered a violation of anti-spam laws — regardless of whether or not you're on the National Do Not Call Registry.

When political candidates do it, however, it's considered smart "voter outreach." 

Like a cavalcade of AI slop pouring directly into our inboxes, the weeks before an election tend to bring out the worst of the worst when it comes to unsolicited texts and phone calls from candidates and their aligned political organizations. From desperate pleas for more money to thinly veiled push polls, our cellphones have quickly become the newest theater for crappy political advertisements to be shoved down our throats. 

And, as infuriating as it can be, it (unfortunately) also makes a lot of sense.

After all, unlike a social media post that depends on the algorithm gods to be seen by prospective voters, a text message sent directly to someone's cellphone is almost guaranteed to be seen — usually within just a few minutes after the notification dings from the little black box in their pocket. And with the rise of text previews on most smartphones nowadays, many recipients don't even have to click on or open the message to see its contents. 

Oh, and it's cheap as well — which is why it has quickly become a preferred way of bringing partisan campaign bullshittery straight to the masses since it was first used on an epic scale in 2020. 

What's remarkable, however, is just how similar such methods look to the type of strategies employed by unscrupulous scammers, spammers and con artists. Just like the robocalls trying to sell us penny stocks, timeshares or other pointless products and services, political calls and texts rarely seem to obtain "express consent" from recipients before flooding their inboxes. 

Indeed, the requirement for campaigns to acquire permission from individuals before sending out mass texts is, apparently, rather loosely interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission. 

Within the political economy, lists of potential voters are bought and sold with few restrictions — each sale transferring your contact information to yet another group, organization or candidate along with your ostensible "consent" for them to reach out to you. As a result, you end up on dozens or even hundreds of lists because, somewhere along the way, you voluntarily signed up for electronic communications from a single like-minded organization or candidate. 

Have you donated to a national political candidate at some point in the last decade? Well, you probably didn't notice, but there was almost undoubtedly a disclosure that told you exactly how your information would be passed around in partisan circles. Sen. Adam Schiff's (D-CA) website, for example, states bluntly that all your data will be shared "With organizations, candidates, campaigns, groups, or causes that we believe have similar political viewpoints, principles, or objectives or share similar goals." 

Similar disclosures appear on the websites of Republicans as well, along with pretty much any other national or local political candidate, activist group or political action committee. 

And make no mistake, selling or trading that information can bring in big bucks for a political operation. The voter list that Hillary Clinton donated to the Democratic National  Committee in 2017, for example, was valued around $3.5 million. Clearly, that sort of market value for personal contact information can be a valuable (and profitable) campaign asset.  

In other words, even a one-time interaction from years ago can land you on plenty of lists today, no matter how many times you might reply "stop" to opt out from any specific organization's communication efforts. 

But even for those who have never signed up or donated to a campaign, the political world has a plethora of ways to dig up data about how you live and how best to contact you. From voter rolls to private data brokers, your information is everywhere. And in much the same way digital marketers have used our online footprints to deliver hyper-targeted advertisements, strategists in the political economy have leveraged such data to give campaigns an unimaginably detailed view of individual voters. 

As of the 2024 election, one data broker claimed to have 171 million cellphone numbers for campaigns to utilize. Another claimed upwards of 220 million detailed voter profiles. And some analytics companies have gone even further, using our digital behavior and cellphone geolocation to not only determine how to contact us, but also customize political messages to our perceived concerns. 

The New York Times, for example, reported that one firm used cellphone location patterns to identify individuals who appeared cautious about COVID restrictions during the pandemic, allowing campaigns to prey on the fears of American citizens in a remarkably invasive manner. 

What's even worse is that there's likely little that can (or will) be done to temper such a stunning invasion of our privacy and personal peace during campaign season. 

After all, those candidates who benefit from such invasive communication strategies aren't about to limit their own ability to get their messages plastered across the homescreens of millions of cellphones each election season. In much the same way political calls are exempt from the National Do Not Call Registry, any regulatory attempt to snuff out such spammy texting behavior will be full of loopholes, exemptions and special permissions for those who currently profit from the status quo. 

Indeed, there are currently efforts taking place to expand the use of such unsolicited "outreach" methods, rather than restrict them.

And let's face facts: We live in a world where our data is everywhere and there's no avoiding its eventual use by unscrupulous actors. Pandora's digital box of surveillance-fueled marketing was opened long ago, and advanced technology is only going to make its use more prolific — among private companies and political grifters alike.   

However, the good news is that better technology can also be used to limit our exposure to such bad behavior. 

Indeed, the political class is already growing concerned about how increasingly effective spam and junk filters are going to impact their future comms efforts. Strategists who used to think a cellphone number was a nearly guaranteed way of speaking directly to a voter are now openly discussing the challenges faced by Apple's iOS and Android's constantly improving junk detection methods. 

In much the same way some politicians were seemingly blindsided by having their mass-email blasts end up in junk folders a couple years ago, many campaigns might soon be stunned to discover that robo-texting is no longer the high-impact tool it was when the practice was first widely adopted.

And for us voters, that's the key: We have to keep flagging those never-ending, unsolicited and unwanted texts as the junk messages they truly are. After all, sending out a bunch of text messages to a bunch of phone numbers that were purchased from some third-party provider is about as close to the clinical definition of "spam" one can imagine. 

If we don't want every donation request, attack ad or "get out the vote" effort to become an automatic push notification on our smartphone, we're going to have to treat those who send them the same way we treat those Nigerian email scammers and timeshare brokers who occasionally show up in our email inboxes. 

Flag it as junk and send it straight to the trash bin.

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas and founder of Schaus Creative LLC, an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him on Twitter @schausmichael or on Substack @creativediscourse.