The fundamentals of political texting for campaigns: what it is, how SMS and RCS voter outreach works, and how to get started.
A2P is application-to-person messaging, texts sent from software to people at scale. It's the category political texting falls under, and it's why 10DLC registration exists. Here's what A2P means for campaigns.
The essential political texting vocabulary in one place, 10DLC, TCPA, P2P, broadcast, A2P, opt-in, quiet hours, and more, each defined in plain language for campaign operators.
A2P (application-to-person) is software sending messages at scale, what campaigns mostly do, and it's regulated and must be registered. P2P (peer-to-peer) is genuinely manual, one human to one person. The line matters because it changes the rules that apply.
Your daily limit is set by your 10DLC registration tier and carrier throughput, not by how many you want to send. Registered campaigns get higher throughput; unregistered or low-trust traffic gets throttled hard. Volume also has to respect quiet hours and consent.
You register your organization (the brand) and then each messaging use case (the campaign) through The Campaign Registry, usually handled by your texting platform. Brand vetting sets your trust score, which sets your throughput. Start early, it takes time.
Two-way texting means voters can reply and a person answers. Here's what two-way texting is, how it differs from one-way blasts, why the reply is where the value is, and what an inbox lets a campaign do.
Sender reputation is the carriers' running judgment of whether your traffic is wanted, built from complaint rates, STOP rates, and spam reports. A good reputation delivers; a bad one gets filtered. It's earned over time and can't be bought back quickly.
A suppression list is the record of everyone you must never text, opt-outs, wrong numbers, do-not-contacts. Here's what it is, why it's a core compliance tool, and why it has to work across every campaign.
Most campaigns use 10DLC long codes (standard 10-digit numbers), they're faster to set up, cheaper, and support the two-way conversations texting programs need. Short codes cost more and suit very high-volume one-way blasting, which most campaigns don't need.
Throughput is how fast you can send, messages per second. Here's what texting throughput is, why the political 10DLC lane unlocks more of it, and why it decides whether your GOTV blast lands in time.
A single SMS is 160 characters, and longer messages split into segments that each cost a send. Here's how SMS character limits work, why they matter for cost and clarity, and when to reach for MMS or RCS.
A sender ID is what identifies who a text is from. Here's what a sender ID is, how it differs across number types, why it matters for trust and deliverability, and how it ties to sender identification rules.