u up? Go vote.
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On friday, I called to our producer, shao roth, who lives in grand rapids, michigan. Hi, shana.

How are you this morning? I'm you know, hanging in there was a.

of course, lives in a swing state. She's not registered with a party. So to the various campaigns, she's of voter up for grabs. And I was wondering as a mission and voter if you could pick up your phone and um read me some of the text messages you've gotten lately.

So for example, I have a very long one that has a really like aggressive countdown, end of the month, deadline. That one appears to be asking me for, hey, election day is next week we're looking for voting ambassadors to talk to their friends about comella herri. And tim Harris is going to be an east lancing on sunday afternoon asking me if I have ay up to two hundred dollars.

Step in is completely remote. Want to join. Stop whole thread of ones from illicit lock and that go away back.

Oh my god, that's a lot of text. You're showing them .

to me a lot going back from that one one that I got a few days ago, which was very odd, came with a picture of my supposed voting location, says if you're registered to vote at your address record suggests that you may not have voted yet, this data could be out of date. And then IT has what he thinks is my early voting location. And then a picture of IT, which initially I thought was like a picture taken from a car.

But if I zoom in at the bottom, it's it's from google maps. I mean, I get at least three to five a day at this point. Wow, and that's just the text message. Is that that doesn't even get into what is going on in our mailbox right now?

Is this the most that you ve ever gotten her? Or did you get a lot last cycle too?

I think this is the most I really do. I don't remember the sheer volume attacking my phone like this before today on the show .

how and why political texting went insane. I was your lary and you're listening to what next? T, V, D, A show about technology, power and how the future will be determined. Stick around. Oh, we might text you.

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You can reach all people simultaneously. And to be up on the airwaves, you don't need to do the traditional retail politics that they had been doing for a century or or more.

That's jack of ni izon, a political science professor at the university at buffalo. One of things he studies is how campaigns have changed over time.

And turns out that a lot of research last twenty years or so suggest that you know ads have their place, but really go T V, get out the vote. Um ground game types of activities are really the best bang for your book. And I think that is largely still true to this day. Even in an era where campaigns are trying to do lots of different things to reach voters.

I think a transitional period where you still have legacy media connecting with enough voters, typically older voters that you still have over the air broadcast advertising being air in places where you can find good voters, right? Their older voters, you're watching the nightly news and you still need to be able to reach them. But at the same time, they're trying to figure out how to get to Younger generations, which means things like text message campaigns, that means things like targeting through social media IT means um you placing ads and video games, which was something that broke obama's campaign had done. So I think that the core lessons of that research are still there, even though we're trying to fine sort of new, new technologies to reach voters.

Text outreach really exploded in the twenty twenty election. For one simple reason, cov IT campaigns pulled way back from in person events, especially the democrats.

earlier this week on the recommendation officials, my campaign cancel election nite rallies. We had planned the hole and clean an ohio. We also, we imagining the format for a large crowd events we had planned in chicago, miami, in the coming days.

So the republicans did do more face to face contacting than than democrats. But democrats, if they were to stay on message that you should take this seriously, you should know, keep in line with the health regulations and the best practices there. They have to figure out a way to run a campaign that doesn't involve a lot of face to face contact. The consultants i've talked to suggest that they really didn't see that much of a drop off in contact rates and that much of a drop off and efficacy of those contacts from using something like text. So I think they're continued to lean into IT because it's easy, it's cost effective, it's cheap and IT tends to work, particularly with Younger demographics.

Yeah, I just unsubscribe my mother from like seventy five different political texts. So clearly, there is some efficacy here. yes. I Normally we .

think of these things is being effective at the margins, right? They're not having huge effects. Know the effect sizes is really for almost anything a campaign can do, hover in the mid single digits t and that's not a good day, right?

So we're not talking about massive changes and sentiment, massive changes in intended turn out, massive changes in persuasion. So much of what goes on in campaigns this sort of baked in from the gio. It's the nature of the times to say to the economy.

It's voted fatigue with different political parties, right? Lots of these things that the campaigns can try to shape perceptions of, but for the most part, they're out of their control. And so what they do, because they do, there are lots of money at things that are in their control, and that involves contacting voters, putting paid media out there. And so they're gona put tons of money into whatever they can. And even if it's not moving, the needle of ton is still has the potential to be determined in a really close race.

What how cheap is, say, setting about a text messages, hey, lizzy, don't forget to vote. Compared to the traditional, go to local T, V station and take out a thirty second .

spot mean the biggest cost for text messaging would be on the front end getting access to the numbers, knowing who you're contacting. And that's often times a matter of merging voter file data with commercial level information, right?

Who are these people that we're contacting um and is this data curated in such a way that I ideally reaching the people that I want to be reaching? And so that ends up being the vast majority of the costs in terms of a text message campaign and also there might be some cost in terms of personalization, the ones that I get because I still have with constant phone number. So I have not escaped to either are typically from or at least gear to look like they're from a staffer, they're from somebody volunteering for the campaign.

So there is a little bit of cost put into the attempt at personalization blood, for the most part, it's gonna on the front end versus no advertising in particularly very expensive media markets is you know unbelievably expensive. IT can be for the camping is depending on where they're trying to air. And of course, in states, those tend to be pretty expensive media markets.

How good is that data? I mean, one of the things we talk about a lot on this show is the granularity of the data that a facebook and amazon, a very large platform, has about you um your interest do campaigns and packs have data at at that granular a degree oh yes.

So they typically start with a voter file, which you know the laws surrounding IT very from from state to state. Typically they're made available for free or very cheap to the campaigns, particularly the major campaigns.

There are some states that make a kind of cost prohibitive for third party runs, but for the most part of your democrat or republican particular in the national stage, that ends up being fairly costless to you, at least not not terribly so. And that's going to include voter history. It's going to include address how often you vote.

If your party registration state, it's gona have your party registration there. And so already off the bed, they know whether you are a good voter or not and they're gonna know um course where you live. Sometimes the phone number is in that voter file.

Other information, depending on the state could be there as well. And of the party registration state, they're going to know what you're registered as he was not a perfect correspondence between registration and people's part of an identity. But it's really close.

I mean, from that, they will go to private data firms that will append those data from the voter file to consumer data, the appended to census level data, past election results in terms of the voting patterns of the surrounding area that you live in. So IT turns out that IT might just be easier to persuade somebody who is kind of an island, right, if they're a democrat in a largely new republican area. That's information you want to know because they're probably already getting a lot of social pressure and social cues to move in that direction anyway.

So a little bit of nudged from the campaign can put them in that direction. They also love to see kind of divided household households that are divided husband, wife for partner and you know they living at the same address, but they're registered with different parties. Those might be people who are persuadable because they're getting cross cutting messages throughout .

their daily life. IT seems like from what you're saying, that the the potential for hyper targeting is really there. And yet I also wondered, like, oh, is that is that invasive? Do I run the risk of turning off a voter by giving them such a personalized message?

There is the potential for backlist effects. So one of the tactics and this comes out the political science literature is um basically like voter report cards. And so they tell you here's how often you vote in the past.

Here's how your closest neighbors, how often they vote in the past. And of course, IT helps to say what your neighbors are voting at a higher rate than you are. What's your problem? That's not quite that blunt.

But every time a local campaign touts out that tactic, which again has been shown to work in the literature, ah there are people who are upset there. He feels invasive. We don't necessarily know how much of our information is out there.

I think maybe we should at this point but we don't necessarily know um particularly the political arena. We think that is a secret ballot and should be private. And this is a secret ballot we don't know people voted for but IT is public record that you voted. And so I think that feels invisible for a number of people. And even though the literature suggests that social pressure of that nature can work on average, some of the consultants i've talked to local league say that they avoid IT because they do fear that .

backlash effect when we come back to sending dozens of increasingly desperate political texts work. Have you heard about double non mics? It's okay if you have in.

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The federal visor recently announced a big rate cut, and there could be more rate cuts this year and in twenty twenty five as well. That's good news if you're looking to buy a home, but IT might not be so good for the interest you earn on your cash. So if you want to lock in a six percent or higher yield with a diversified portfolio of high yield and investment grade bonds, check out public dot com IT only takes a couple of minutes to sign up, and once you lock in your yellow, you can earn regular interest payments even as rates decline.

Walk in a six percent or higher yield with a bond account at public dot com forward flash, what next? But remember, your yield is not locked in until you invest brought to you by public investing member fena and sec. As of september twenty six, twenty twenty four, the average annualized yield to worst across the bond account is greater than six percent yield towards is not guaranteed, not an investment recommendation, all investing involves risk visit public that com slash disclosures slash bond dash account for more info.

Have you heard about double non mics? It's okay if you haven't. It's extremely niche and practice. discover. Here is an example. Discover automatically doubles the cash back earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with cash back match.

That means with discover, you could turn one hundred fifty dollars cash back to three hundred dollars IT pays to discover see terms at discover doc com flash credit card. How good is this stuff? I mean, does IT actually work to text someone or IT just like, man, cheap.

it's cheap. Um and you know there is some research suggesting that IT IT works a little bit and or not talking about huge effects here.

Um the vast majority of the difference in election outcomes can be explained with reference to these big factors that are really hard to move, right? We can try to change voters perceptions of something like the economy, but it's still the case that the economy measured and in some sort of objective way seems the matter quite a bit is the nature, the times kind of argument. So yeah, we're not talking about huge effects with any of this stuff.

But campaigns, they have to do something right if they just step back and didn't campaign and say, well, i'm just going to ride the wave here um I don't think anybody would think of them as as rational political actors anymore even if that ultimately what happens, they spend all this money and they were probably gone to win anyway. And that's probably the vast majority of campaigns end up being I do this because I feel like I have to do IT and i'm going to feel really, really dumb if I lose and I didn't put in a minimum level of work here. And so yes, we're not going to see campaigns not campaigning or canada is not doing that. But we're really not talking about a lot of movement here. For the most part.

the amount of voter data that is available to a campaign or or to a pack, a super pack also a has a decently high potential for disinformation and misinformation. You know in in pennsylvany, there's this one group, although accident only, send voters a text message saying they're already voted when they had not. That also feels like a world where, as you're saying on the margins, if a small group is affected, that can move the meal.

sure. absolutely. Um you know it's not an arena that is not without um the potential for perl. That being said, it's one that is remarkably difficult to regulate at some level.

Political speech, at least in united states, is afforded an awful lot of living and awful lot of freedom. And I don't know that that's a fact that that people unnecessarily appreciate others. There are things that IT feels like they shouldn't be able to do.

And yet, consistently, the courts have been reluctant to step in and say, here's what you can do in the Serena. Here's what you can do, not that they can do anything, right? There are certainly boundaries from the most part when IT comes to the room of misinformation and disinformation. And last year, you know blatantly telling voters to stay home because of some crisis that doesn't exist if you're tell him little lies, or even sometimes big lies, that still has some kind of protected status.

When you look at the academic research, is there anything that examines just the flood of electronic communication? Because I do wonder if at a certain point, you know, getting four, five, six, seven texts every day turns voters off.

So there is some research out on that. Some of this goes back to the nineteen nineties with respect to the potential demobilizing effect of negative ads. And particularly, I can be turned off by these campaign messages that we're seeing and at least in an experimental setting, there is some evidence to suggest that, yes, some people can be turned off the process. Particularly, they see IT as being nasty or overwhelming or too much .

ads like the infamous wilhite ton commercial from the one thousand and eighty eight presidential campaign aimed at democratic candidate and massachusets governor Michael do caucus. Horton, whose black had been convicted of murder and got a weekend farlow through massachuset state program, orton fled, kidnapped a Young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison ashes to concurs on crime.

The couple heartand attack was White until the ad played into races, stereotypes and stoked fear among White voters. And crucially, IT wasn't made by the George W. A. Bush campaign, but a sympathetic outside group.

And there's a reason why that ad and some of the worst adad i'll ever see are run by outside groups and that give the campaign themselves some measure of distance from them, at least plausible deniability. There are selling examples that we can point you to suggest that there's the potential for a backlash effect here and there might be even be the potential for something like diminishing returns, right? The tenth add matters.

The eleven add maybe matters. The twelve add doesn't do a thing or maybe even the things start to turn in the the other direction. You know that being said that I think most campaigns would rather hit you with too much than not enough.

And that's largely because we know that media affects decay when they decay pretty quickly. There's been a number of studies trying to kind of pinpoint what the time period is. And on the order of two to three weeks, we can we remember a message that we receive for that time period.

IT seems to to shape our behavior, but after that, it's gone right? Might as well not have even been heard. And so the campaign, i'd rather hit somebody who's really plugged in, somebody who's watching all forms media with too much than miss that person who is only tuned in to a few platforms ever so brief.

Why are these messages so unhinged? why? Why do people make these things like exist? Message from the democrats? Just my ex, you know, who wants me to call them.

A really good question. I think there's a couple of answers that, that we could level there. One is IT might just be a reflection of where we are as a body politics and as a society.

Our politics are so polar as right now that um that's the norm and I were used to kind of a smash alth politics right now like we didn't used to be. And I think that um it's there's almost a demand for in some ways we don't we don't like to think that there's a demand for. We don't like to think that about ourselves um but we're simple creatures in summer spects.

And um we still create our neck at a car wreck. We know we shouldn't do IT. We know it's not right and we know that your lovers there is having a really bad day, but we still want to see what's going on.

And I think that, that impulse is very much active in our politics in some ways. And um it's also the case that more negativity, more over the top stuff, tends to stick IT tends to be the things that we remember. There's more usable information there than positive or even more policy driven aspects of a campaign.

So if you have a phone from wisconsin, michigan, sorry, that's just the way it's gonna.

It's common. I think I give an interview some number of years back and they asked me what my advice was and I said, no, I don't know that it's go off the grid during election season, but it's have to be pretty close .

to that jack of night has. So thank you so much for talking with me.

It's been my pleasure. Thank me on.

Jacob nii zl. Is associate professor at the university at buffalo, where he studies american politics. And that is IT for our show today. What next? T B D is produced by ever cambell, Patrick ford, general analysis, jung parry.

Our show is edited by page osberne elish among gary is vice president of audio for slate, and TVB is part of the larger what next family. And if you like what you heard today, the single best way to support our show is to join slate. Get all your slide podcasts at free.

A right will be back next week with more episodes. I'm lazo, Larry. Thanks for listening.