It’s not just you; the entire country is being bombarded with political text messages. The numbers are astronomical, and they show no signs of letting up before voters go to the polls next month.
Anyone who’s found themselves on a political party or campaign’s text-messaging list will attest to the fusillade of fundraising appeals to which they’re subjected. The wave can be measured by the persistent buzz of your phone, or chime alerting you to another message in your inbox. But hard macro data on the scale of America’s political text campaigns has been hard to come by. That’s changing with the release of numbers from RoboKiller, a leading service to combat unwanted robocalls and text-messaging spam.
According to RoboKiller data, Americans received an estimated six billion text messages related to the presidential election alone from June through September. And the volume of texts from political campaigns, parties, and interest groups increased substantially over that time. The 2.7 billion political texts that Americans got in September was nearly six times what they’d received three months earlier.