In the 2024 US election cycle, political campaigns and affiliated organizations sent an estimated 15 billion text messages to voters. That figure is more than double the volume from the 2020 cycle, and the trajectory is only accelerating. SMS and robocalls have become the dominant channels for direct voter contact, surpassing door-to-door canvassing and direct mail in both reach and cost-effectiveness. This article examines how campaigns use these channels, the technical infrastructure behind them, and the regulatory framework that governs political messaging.
Why SMS Dominates Modern Campaign Strategy
The appeal of SMS for political campaigns comes down to three numbers: 98%, 90 seconds, and $0.01-0.05. SMS messages have an open rate of approximately 98%, compared to roughly 20% for email. The median time to read an SMS after delivery is 90 seconds. And the per-message cost for bulk political SMS ranges from one to five cents, making it by far the cheapest way to reach individual voters at scale.
These characteristics make SMS ideal for time-sensitive campaign communications where immediate action is desired. A campaign sending a fundraising appeal via email might see 20% of recipients open it, with most opens occurring over 24-48 hours. The same message via SMS reaches nearly every recipient within minutes.
Campaign SMS Use Cases
Voter Registration Drives
Campaigns and voter advocacy organizations use SMS to remind unregistered or recently moved voters of registration deadlines. These messages typically include a direct link to the state's online registration portal. Targeting is based on voter file data: the campaign identifies individuals who appear in commercial databases but not on voter rolls, or who have recently moved to a new address and need to update their registration.
Get Out the Vote (GOTV)
GOTV is the single largest SMS use case in political campaigns. In the final days before an election, campaigns send millions of messages reminding supporters to vote. These messages are highly personalized, including the voter's name, their specific polling location (derived from their registered address), polling hours, and in states with early voting, a reminder of early voting dates and locations. The most sophisticated campaigns track which supporters have already voted (using publicly available voter history data) and stop sending GOTV messages to those individuals, focusing resources on those who have not yet cast a ballot.
Fundraising
Political fundraising via SMS is a proven high-conversion channel. Campaigns send time-limited appeals tied to news events, debate performances, or filing deadlines, often with a short URL leading to a mobile-optimized donation page. The SMS channel is particularly effective for small-dollar fundraising, where the friction of opening an email, reading a long appeal, and clicking through to a donation page is replaced by a single tap on a link in a 160-character message.
Polling Location and Election Information
Non-partisan organizations frequently use SMS to provide voters with practical election information: polling location lookup (text your address to get your polling place), sample ballots, voter ID requirements for their state, and information about ballot measures. These campaigns typically operate as two-way SMS, where the voter sends a keyword or their address and receives a personalized response.
Issue Advocacy and Persuasion
Beyond operational messages, campaigns use SMS for persuasion, sending messages that highlight a candidate's position on issues that data analytics have identified as important to the recipient. These messages are segmented by demographic, geographic, and behavioral data to maximize relevance.
Robocalls in Political Campaigns
While SMS has overtaken robocalls in volume, automated voice calls remain an important tool for political campaigns, particularly for:
- Polling and surveys: Automated IVR (Interactive Voice Response) calls are used to conduct polls, where the recipient presses keys to indicate their candidate preference, opinion on issues, or likelihood of voting. These "robo-polls" are significantly cheaper than live-caller polls and can reach large samples quickly. However, they face methodological challenges: response rates are low, and the sample is biased toward landline owners and people willing to engage with automated calls.
- Voter ID calls: Campaigns use robocalls to identify supporters (voter identification), asking automated questions to classify voters as supporters, undecided, or opponents. This data feeds into the campaign's voter contact database and determines which voters receive further outreach.
- Turnout reminders: On Election Day, campaigns make automated calls to identified supporters who have not yet voted, reminding them that polls are open and providing their polling location.
- Endorsement messages: Recordings from prominent figures (the candidate, a celebrity supporter, a local official) are delivered via robocall to targeted voter segments.
The A2P vs P2P Debate
A significant controversy in political messaging centers on the distinction between A2P (Application-to-Person) and P2P (Person-to-Person) messaging. The distinction matters because carriers apply different filtering, throughput limits, and registration requirements to each category.
A2P messages are sent from an application (such as a campaign platform) to individual recipients at scale. They travel through registered 10DLC (10-Digit Long Code) numbers or short codes and are subject to carrier filtering, throughput caps, and content standards. P2P messages are ostensibly sent by individual humans from their own phone numbers.
Some political campaigns have used "peer-to-peer" platforms where volunteers send pre-written messages from the platform, which routes them through individual phone numbers rather than A2P infrastructure. The campaigns argue this is genuine P2P communication because a human initiates each message. Carriers and regulators have pushed back, arguing that when a platform enables one person to send thousands of substantially identical messages, it is functionally A2P regardless of the human-in-the-loop, and should be subject to A2P registration and compliance requirements.
The practical resolution has been the expansion of 10DLC registration to include political campaigns. The Campaign Registry (TCR) now has a specific "Political" use case category, and major carriers require campaigns to register their brands and campaigns through TCR to send at scale. For a detailed guide on the registration process, see our A2P 10DLC registration guide.
Compliance Framework: TCPA and Beyond
Political messaging operates within a complex regulatory environment:
TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act)
The TCPA requires prior express consent before sending automated text messages or making robocalls to mobile phones. However, political campaigns benefit from a significant carve-out: the FCC has exempted political calls and texts from the TCPA's "prior express consent" requirement when the communication is not commercial in nature. This means campaigns can send messages to voters who have not opted in, as long as the messages are political (not selling a product or service).
However, this exemption has limits:
- Messages that include a fundraising solicitation may be considered commercial and thus require consent.
- The Do Not Call Registry does not apply to political calls, but some states have their own restrictions.
- The 2024 FCC ruling on AI-generated voices in robocalls added new requirements for campaigns using synthetic voice technology.
- All messages must include opt-out instructions (typically "Reply STOP to opt out"), and opt-outs must be honored immediately.
State-Level Regulations
Several states have enacted their own political messaging laws that are more restrictive than federal rules. For example, some states require explicit disclosure of who paid for the message, restrict texting hours, or require prior consent even for political messages. Campaigns operating nationally must navigate a patchwork of state regulations in addition to federal TCPA rules.
Carrier Policies
Major US carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon) enforce their own messaging policies through 10DLC registration and content filtering. Political campaigns must register through the TCR with proper EIN documentation, and messages must comply with carrier content standards. Campaigns that fail to register or that violate content policies face message filtering (silent blocking) or number suspension.
Technical Infrastructure for Campaign Messaging
A national political campaign sending millions of SMS messages requires substantial technical infrastructure:
- Voter file integration: Campaign platforms ingest voter files (purchased from state election offices or compiled by data vendors like L2 or TargetSmart) containing names, addresses, phone numbers, party registration, vote history, and demographic data. The SMS platform segments this data to target specific messages to specific voter groups.
- Number provisioning: Campaigns provision hundreds or thousands of 10DLC phone numbers, each registered with the TCR under the campaign's brand. Numbers are distributed across messages to stay within per-number throughput limits (typically 15-75 messages per second per number for political use cases, depending on the campaign's TCR trust score).
- Delivery optimization: Campaign platforms must manage deliverability across multiple carriers, handle delivery receipts, process opt-outs in real time, and retry failed deliveries. For campaigns sending millions of messages on a single day (such as Election Day GOTV), burst capacity and queue management are critical.
- Two-way messaging: Many campaigns use two-way SMS to engage voters in conversation, answer questions, and collect data (survey responses, volunteer sign-ups). This requires real-time inbound message processing and often integrates with CRM systems.
Cost Comparison with Traditional Advertising
The economics of SMS versus traditional campaign advertising are compelling:
- Direct mail: $0.50-1.50 per piece (printing, postage, list rental). A statewide mailing of 1 million pieces costs $500K-1.5M.
- Television advertising: $5-50 per thousand impressions (CPM), but with no guarantee that the viewer is a registered voter in the target district.
- Door-to-door canvassing: $5-15 per door knocked (paid canvassers). Effective but extremely labor-intensive and geographically limited.
- Bulk SMS: $0.01-0.05 per message. The same 1 million voter contacts cost $10K-50K, with 98% open rates and delivery within seconds.
The cost advantage of SMS is so significant that it has fundamentally changed campaign resource allocation. Down-ballot campaigns (state legislature, county offices) that could never afford television advertising or large-scale direct mail can run effective voter contact programs entirely through SMS.
Scale and Impact: Campaign Reach Numbers
To put campaign SMS volumes in perspective:
- A competitive US Senate race in a large state might send 50-100 million text messages over the course of the campaign cycle.
- Presidential campaigns in the 2024 cycle sent over 2 billion messages each.
- Super PACs and advocacy organizations collectively sent billions more, often to the same voter lists, resulting in voters in competitive states receiving dozens of political texts per week in the final month before the election.
- The peak sending day in 2024 was Election Day itself, when GOTV operations sent hundreds of millions of messages in a 12-hour window.
This volume creates real technical challenges. A campaign that needs to send 50 million GOTV messages between 8 AM and 8 PM on Election Day requires sustained throughput of approximately 1,160 messages per second for 12 hours straight. This demands a carrier-grade SMS platform with proper capacity planning, multiple carrier interconnections, and robust failover capabilities.
Best Practices for Campaign Messaging
Based on data from multiple election cycles, successful campaign SMS programs follow several principles:
- Segment aggressively: Do not send the same message to every voter. Segment by party registration, vote history (frequent vs. infrequent voters), geography, age, and issue interests.
- Time it right: GOTV messages are most effective on the day of the election and the day before. Fundraising messages perform best immediately after major news events. Avoid sending before 9 AM or after 9 PM local time.
- Keep it short: The most effective political SMS messages are under 160 characters (one segment). Multi-segment messages cost more and see lower engagement.
- Personalize: Include the voter's first name and reference their specific polling location or early voting site. Personalized messages see 25-40% higher action rates.
- Honor opt-outs instantly: Both legally required and strategically important. A voter who opts out and continues to receive messages becomes hostile to the campaign.
- Test and iterate: A/B test message copy, send times, and sender IDs. Track which messages drive actual actions (link clicks, donations, volunteer sign-ups) rather than just delivery rates.
Looking Ahead: RCS and Rich Political Messaging
As RCS (Rich Communication Services) adoption grows, political campaigns will gain access to richer messaging formats: branded sender IDs, images, carousels, suggested replies, and read receipts. RCS messages can include interactive elements like one-tap donation buttons, polling location maps, and sample ballot previews, all within the native messaging app. This will further increase SMS's dominance as the primary voter contact channel.
For campaign organizations looking to build or scale their voter outreach infrastructure, MOBITELSMS provides high-throughput SMS campaign services with full 10DLC registration support for political use cases.