It comes in a plain envelope, certified, with a return address from a law firm you've never heard of. Inside is two pages that will consume your next six weeks: a demand letter alleging your campaign sent texts without consent, a citation to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and a settlement number with a lot of zeros.
By the time it lands, the damage is done. You can't un-send the texts. You can only pay.
The math that makes it terrifying
Here's why a single letter can end a campaign's finances. The TCPA sets damages at $500 per text, and $1,500 per text if a court finds the violation willful. There is no cap on the total. Every message to every recipient is a separate violation.
Do the arithmetic on your last blast. Ten thousand texts to a list you can't prove consent for is five to fifteen million dollars in exposure, from one send. The demand letter won't ask for all of it. It will ask for a number designed to feel like relief compared to that, and to be cheaper to pay than to fight.
Why fighting rarely helps
The letter is the opening move in a machine built to make settling the rational choice. The plaintiff's lawyer works on contingency, so the case costs them little to file. Discovery will demand your entire sending history, your consent records (or the absence of them), your vendor contracts. Every text you can't tie to a documented opt-in is a violation stacking onto the total. The class-action version turns one plaintiff into thousands.
And this is happening constantly. In the first eleven months of 2025 alone, 2,588 TCPA suits were filed, and TCPA class actions were up nearly 95% year over year. Campaigns are squarely in the crosshairs, because campaigns text at scale, often in a hurry, often without the records to prove consent. This isn't hypothetical: the Trump campaign was sued for it more than once, and the NRCC was hit with a class action.
The part that should keep you up
The demand letter isn't the risk. It's the symptom. The risk was the decision, weeks or months earlier, to text a list without documented consent, to skip registration, to reuse a purchased file. The letter is just the bill arriving. By the time you're reading it, the only questions left are how much and how fast.
That's the horror of TCPA exposure. It's not a warning shot. There's no yellow card. The first time you hear about the problem is the day it's already unfixable.
The only defense is the one you build first
You cannot litigate your way out of texts you already sent. You can only make sure the letter never has a case: documented consent for every contact, honored opt-outs, proper registration, and the records to prove all of it. That's not paperwork. It's the difference between a demand letter that's a nuisance and one that's an extinction event.
The campaigns that treat compliance as the floor never open that envelope. The ones that treat it as optional open it in October. Build the defense now, while you still can, because the day the letter arrives, it's the day you find out you didn't.
Frequently asked questions
How much can a TCPA demand letter cost a campaign?
Damages run $500 per text, or $1,500 per text for willful violations, with no cap on the total. A single 10,000-message send without documented consent can carry $5-15 million in exposure, which is why settlement demands can dwarf a campaign's budget.
Can I just fight a TCPA claim instead of settling?
You can, but the system is built to make settling rational: contingency-fee plaintiffs, discovery into your entire sending and consent history, and per-message damages that stack. Without documented consent for the texts at issue, there's usually little to fight with.
This article discusses legal risk and is informational, not legal advice. Consult counsel.
Keep reading: The cost of non-compliance in political campaign texting and what to do when you get a TCPA demand letter.