FRESNO, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) – As the election gets even closer, a lot of us are receiving many text messages from candidates and campaigns about wanting our vote.
“Irritated, very irritated,” voter Katie Tkac said. “It’s on TV, it’s on the radio, it’s everywhere, you can’t even breathe without it being in your face.”
Despite many voters finding the robo-texts annoying, experts said there are good reasons why campaigns send the messages out.
The text messages do not just ask for your vote, some ask for your money, with links to donations. Messages even sometimes greet you by name and can include a picture or video message with the text.
With information overload, shorter attention spans, and a changing media landscape, campaigns are doing whatever they can to reach voters.
“Many voters aren’t out looking. And so the question is, can you influence their vote by having them come across something?” U.C. Merced Politics professor Nathan Monroe asked.
He added that sometimes these texts can do the trick.
“Campaigns are able to directly feed their message into our phone in a way that we just reflexively are going to see. And even if we see it, we push it away immediately because we’re not interested. There’s a sort of psychological effect there where we’ve been exposed and we can’t totally get rid of that,” he said.
But why are some of us getting so many?
Monroe said campaigns can get public records about likely voters and can buy data sets to get our phone numbers. While they cannot see who you voted for, they might be able to see when you have showed up to vote in the past.
So, if you feel like you get more campaign texts than your friends, a campaign might think your opinion could be swayed or they can count on you to show up to vote.
He said even the content of the message you read can be targeted and crafted specific to you and your data.
But who is sending and paying for these texts? Oftentimes it’s not just the candidate and their campaign. Political action committees (PACS), independent expenditures, and the part organizations all play a role.
The other reason we see so many, comes down to money. Monroe said they are much cheaper to send than paying for a TV ad spot, and it is much more targeted than TV. It potentially puts the message right in front of the right voter.
Monroe said these texts are not really too different from seeing a campaign road sign.
“Name recognition. Right. Is such a huge part of what causes a candidate to go from being a total, you know, a sort of longshot to a reasonably qualified candidate is just purely on their name,” he said.
And name recognition can be huge, when otherwise undecided or voters who have not been following the candidates closely, fill out their ballots.
“With those local elections. Right. It’s a potentially really cost-effective strategy,” Monroe said.
If you want to opt-out from messages, just reply with “STOP.”
