We built the report we kept wishing existed. Today it's live.
The State of Political Texting 2026 is a data report on the channel that now carries American voter contact, grounded in sourced figures and in our own database of the 2026 ballot. It's nonpartisan, it's cited throughout, and it reads as research, not a brochure.
A few of the numbers inside:
- 78.7% of US adults now live in wireless-only households. The home phone reaches a shrinking, unrepresentative minority, which is why the text became the phone program.
- 25 billion political texts moved in the 2024 cycle, up 56% from 16 billion in 2022, roughly 100 million a week at peak.
- ~70% of small-dollar donations now originate from text, by the NRSC's own internal estimate.
- $1.56 is the cost to produce one additional vote by text in the field-experiment literature, against roughly $67 by mail and $200 by commercial phone. Email produced no measurable effect at all.
- 1,875 candidates across 678 offices on the 2026 statewide and federal ballot, compiled from official filings, data we don't think anyone else is publishing.
And the part that ties it together: the rules. The report maps the state-by-state regulatory landscape, the mini-TCPA wave, the per-message penalties, and the device-level filtering that's quietly reshaping deliverability, and makes the case that in 2026, compliance isn't the tax on a texting program. Non-compliance is.
What makes it different
Most "state of the channel" pieces are vendor decks with a chart borrowed from someone else. This one is built on primary sources: the CDC on reachability, published market data on the messaging economy, a decade of randomized field experiments on whether texting actually moves turnout (it does, and email doesn't), and our own compiled candidate data for the 2026 map. Every figure is sourced, and the methodology is spelled out.
It's also honest about its own limits, where a number is a committee's own estimate, we say so; where the data is contested, we show both sides.
How to read it
- Read the interactive report in your browser, free, no form. Navigate it by section, jump around, take what you need.
- Download the designed PDF from that page for the full report to keep, share, or hand to a colleague.
If you run a program, a committee, or a consultancy, this is the briefing we'd want on our own desk heading into November. If it's useful, pass it along.
The report is nonpartisan and informational, not legal advice. Full sourcing appears in its methodology section.
Keep reading: The cost of non-compliance in political campaign texting and the 2026 midterms are a turnout election.