The State of
Political Texting.
Reach, adoption, money, and the rules that now govern the dominant channel in American voter contact.
The channel most of the electorate now lives on
Political texting is no longer an experiment. It is the backbone of American voter contact, and four forces made it so at once: who can be reached, what the channel costs, how much money it raises, and how heavily it is now regulated.
The through-line: reach and revenue made texting universal among serious campaigns, while a fracturing legal map and device-level filtering are raising the cost of doing it carelessly. The programs that win in 2026 are the disciplined ones.
How texting took over
Political texting did not arrive overnight. It is the product of a technology standard, a body of turnout science, a fundraising boom, and a compliance regime that all matured over fifteen years.
Each thread reinforced the others. The turnout science gave campaigns a reason to text; the fundraising boom gave them the budget; 10DLC and the mini-TCPA wave set the rules; and RCS is now reshaping what a text can be. The rest of this report takes those threads one at a time.
The channel
Why texting became essential — the reach that makes it necessary, the economy it rides, the scale it operates at, the performance that keeps the money flowing, and the field-experiment evidence that it actually moves votes.
The reachability shift
The single fact underneath everything is the death of the landline.
Since 2007 the CDC's National Health Interview Survey has tracked the share of US adults living in wireless-only households. It has risen almost without interruption, and as of late 2024 it stood at 78.7%. Among adults aged 25 to 44 it runs near 88%; among renters and lower-income adults, higher still.
A voter-contact plan built on the home phone now reaches a shrinking, older, unrepresentative slice of the electorate. The device that is always in a pocket is a texting device first: calls to it go increasingly unanswered, screened by the same spam-labeling that collapsed pick-up rates over the last decade.
This is why texting stopped being one tactic among many and became the spine of a modern contact plan. It is the only channel that combines near-universal reach with near-universal readership, and the reach half of that equation is still widening every year.
The messaging economy texting rides
Texting sits on a large, fast-growing commercial channel — which is why its tooling, deliverability infrastructure, and carrier rules keep maturing under campaigns' feet.
The US A2P messaging market is roughly $26 billion in 2026 and is projected to keep climbing through the decade. Within it, US SMS marketing specifically has reached $12.6 billion, growing north of 20% a year.
The demand side has shifted just as hard. About 84% of consumers have opted in to receive texts from businesses and organizations, up roughly 35% since 2021. Organizations now devote an average of nearly a fifth of their marketing budgets to SMS, and a large majority plan to spend more next year. People no longer merely tolerate a text from an organization they chose to hear from; they expect it — the same consent-based relationship a campaign should be building.
The practical consequence of riding a commercial channel is that its rules — carrier registration, filtering, verified sending — apply to political traffic too, written by an industry that spends billions protecting deliverability.
A channel measured in tens of billions
In politics specifically, the volume is staggering and still climbing.
That 2024 total works out to an estimated 100 million political texts a week at the peak of the cycle. And the messages get seen: roughly 97% of texts are opened within 15 minutes of delivery, a figure no other outbound channel comes close to matching.
The growth is not slowing. Each competitive cycle pushes volume higher as more campaigns, down to the local level, adopt the channel and as fundraising programs lean on it harder. The risk that comes with that volume — saturation, opt-outs, and carrier filtering — is the subject of Part III.
The evidence
Adoption is one thing; effect is another. The field-experiment record on whether texting moves votes, what it costs per vote, which messages work, and how it benchmarks against email.
What the channel actually delivers
The reason the money and the opt-ins follow is performance. On the metrics that matter — reach, readership, and cost per outcome — texting wins.
Nonprofit benchmarks make the cost story concrete. In the 2023 cycle, organizations raised about $92 per 1,000 fundraising texts, higher per message than the $76 per 1,000 fundraising emails over the same period — before accounting for texting's dramatically higher open and response rates.
Layer on the reach data from Section 01 and the readership from Section 03, and the picture is clear: a consented text list reaches more of the real electorate, gets read faster, and converts at a lower cost per dollar than the alternatives. That is why a consented list is the single most valuable owned asset a campaign has — it is not rented from an algorithm, and it performs.
The caveat: these returns depend entirely on list quality and discipline. Blasting an unconsented or poorly-segmented list drives opt-outs and carrier filtering faster than donations, erasing the advantage. Performance is a property of well-run programs, not of the channel by itself.
Does texting actually work?
Adoption is one thing; effect is another. A decade of randomized field experiments has measured whether text messages change turnout — and the answer is yes, at a fraction of the cost of other methods.
The foundational study, Dale and Strauss (2009), sent voters a single reminder before the 2006 election and found it raised turnout by 3.0 percentage points (intent-to-treat), at a cost of just $1.56 per additional vote. Later work refined the picture: Green and Gerber's meta-analysis puts the average effect of a cold, at-scale SMS at 0.29 points, comparable per contact to direct mail and phone calls but far cheaper to deliver. The Analyst Institute found "plan-making" texts — those that walk a voter through when and how they will vote — lifted turnout 0.9 to 1.4 points.
Turnout lift by contact method (percentage points)
Two findings recur and matter for strategy. First, email shows no measurable turnout effect — in head-to-head tests, text moves people and email does not. Second, the effect is strongest among low-propensity, young, and infrequent voters, exactly the people a turnout program most needs and the hardest to move any other way.
The cheapest vote in politics
The turnout effect is only half the story. The other half is what that effect costs - and here texting is not just competitive, it is in a different league.
Synthesizing the field-experiment literature, the cost to produce one additional vote runs roughly $29 for door-to-door canvassing, $35 for volunteer phone banks, $67 for direct mail, and $125 or more for commercial phone banks (Green and Gerber). Email produces no measurable additional votes at any price. A text-message reminder, by contrast, produced a vote for $1.56 in the foundational study.
Cost per additional vote, by method (lower is better)
The gap is not marginal. A dollar spent on texting can reach and move an order of magnitude more voters than the same dollar on mail or paid phones. Door-knocking still produces the highest-quality contact per attempt, but it cannot scale to a million voters in a weekend. Texting is the only channel that is both cheap and scalable, which is why it now anchors the budget of serious turnout and fundraising programs alike.
What actually works in a text
Not all texts are equal. The same experiments that proved texting works also revealed which messages move people and which fall flat.
The strongest performers are consistent across studies. Plan-making messages - those that walk a voter through when, where, and how they will vote - reliably outperform generic reminders. Political-efficacy framing ("your vote matters here") and specific, local information (the reader's own polling place and deadline) both lift response. And value before the ask - updates, thanks, and wins interleaved with fundraising - is what keeps a list responsive over a cycle.
Just as important is what does not work. Social-pressure messaging ("whether you vote is public record"), a reliable tactic in mail and at the door, actually underperformed in texting experiments - it reads as threatening in an intimate channel. Generic, undifferentiated asks drive opt-outs faster than donations. And email, tested head-to-head, moved no one. The medium rewards messages that are specific, useful, and human, and punishes those that are generic, manipulative, or impersonal.
What the numbers look like
Beyond the experiments, the industry's own benchmark data shows how text performs against email in practice — and where the healthy limits are.
On engagement, text beats email on the metrics that matter. In the 2026 M+R Benchmarks, fundraising texts drew a 0.17% response rate against email's 0.05%, and advocacy texts a 2.6% response against email's 1.4%. Mobile revenue grew 48% in 2025, more than three times the 15% growth of online revenue overall.
Response rate, text vs email (%)
The discipline the experiments imply shows up here too. The average opt-out rate is about 1.1% per message — roughly eleven unsubscribes per thousand, a healthy range for a program that provides value between asks. Opt-outs run lowest on engagement messages and spike when a program exceeds eight messages a month without clear urgency. The pattern is consistent with everything else in this report: texting rewards the consented, well-paced, value-first program and punishes the blast.
The money & the ballot
Where the dollars come from and where the races are — the fundraising engine that drove adoption, and the full scale of the 2026 ballot, state by state.
Adoption follows the fundraising
Texting became universal in politics because it raises money, and the numbers are now enormous.
By the NRSC's own internal estimate, roughly 70% of small-dollar donations now originate from text messages. In 2020, texting generated nearly half of all small-dollar donations, and 45.7% of presidential-candidate texts were direct donation asks. ActBlue reports up to 90% of contributions during peak moments arrive by mobile; WinRed processed $1.8 billion from 4.5 million small-dollar donors in 2024 alone, and $5.6 billion across three cycles.
A nine-figure vendor industry — top texting vendors by 2026-cycle revenue
Analysis of FEC disbursements puts 2026-cycle vendor spend above $150 million across roughly a dozen major firms, with companies serving both parties among the largest. Which side leans on texting more is genuinely contested: one analysis of service spending found Democratic-aligned committees spending more, while message-volume trackers found Republicans sending more political texts than Democrats through much of 2024. What is not contested is the direction — the industry is nine figures and growing, and small-dollar-heavy campaigns of both parties depend on it.
The 2026 ballot at scale
Here is data no one else is publishing. Drawing on Txtra's 2026 candidate database, compiled from official state filings, the statewide-and-federal ballot alone comprises 1,875 candidates contesting 678 distinct offices.
2026 races by office type
Candidates by party
Open seats, by office type
2026 is a change election by structure. 164 of the 678 offices are open seats, half of the 36 governorships among them, and 92% of all these offices feature both a Democrat and a Republican. Open, contested races draw crowded, expensive fields — and the heaviest texting spend.
Where the races — and the texting — concentrate
Precise per-state adoption isn't publicly reported. But the addressable market is: the candidates and offices that make a state a texting market. Texting concentrates where the races are.
2026 statewide + federal candidates, top 15 states
Volume and competitiveness differ: the races that decide control cluster in a smaller set of battlegrounds — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona — where margins run within a few points and texting spend runs hardest.
2026 candidates and offices, all 50 states
| State | Cand | Off |
|---|---|---|
| California | 129 | 62 |
| Texas | 114 | 47 |
| Florida | 95 | 33 |
| Michigan | 84 | 17 |
| Tennessee | 71 | 11 |
| New York | 70 | 30 |
| Colorado | 57 | 13 |
| Ohio | 57 | 21 |
| Illinois | 50 | 23 |
| Georgia | 48 | 25 |
| North Carolina | 42 | 15 |
| Louisiana | 41 | 7 |
| New Jersey | 41 | 14 |
| Pennsylvania | 41 | 19 |
| South Carolina | 41 | 15 |
| Oklahoma | 40 | 15 |
| Arizona | 39 | 15 |
| Nevada | 38 | 10 |
| Virginia | 38 | 12 |
| Massachusetts | 35 | 16 |
| Minnesota | 33 | 13 |
| Rhode Island | 33 | 8 |
| Idaho | 32 | 10 |
| Nebraska | 32 | 10 |
| Wisconsin | 32 | 13 |
| State | Cand | Off |
|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 31 | 15 |
| Maryland | 31 | 12 |
| Indiana | 30 | 12 |
| Kansas | 29 | 10 |
| Iowa | 27 | 11 |
| Missouri | 27 | 9 |
| Arkansas | 26 | 12 |
| Connecticut | 25 | 11 |
| Vermont | 23 | 7 |
| New Mexico | 22 | 11 |
| Oregon | 22 | 9 |
| Utah | 22 | 4 |
| Delaware | 21 | 5 |
| Kentucky | 21 | 7 |
| Washington | 20 | 10 |
| New Hampshire | 19 | 4 |
| North Dakota | 18 | 8 |
| South Dakota | 17 | 9 |
| Wyoming | 16 | 7 |
| Mississippi | 14 | 5 |
| Hawaii | 12 | 4 |
| Alaska | 11 | 3 |
| Montana | 11 | 3 |
| Maine | 9 | 4 |
| West Virginia | 8 | 3 |
Four battlegrounds, up close
The national numbers resolve into a handful of states where the races, the rules, and the turnout math all collide. Four of them, by way of example.
The through-line: the states that matter most for turnout are often the ones with the trickiest rules. A program texting across Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona at once is running four different legal playbooks simultaneously - which is exactly why per-recipient compliance is not a convenience but a requirement.
The rules & the future
The fracturing legal map campaigns must now navigate, the technologies remaking the channel, and what a program should do to win in the environment ahead.
The regulatory map, state by state
The rules are no longer national. A growing bloc of states layers stricter windows, message caps, and penalties on top of the federal 8am–9pm floor.
Most of these are commercial-telemarketing statutes; many carve out political speech, so they do not all bind a political text the way they bind a sales text. But the federal consent requirement for autodialed texts to cells applies regardless, carriers enforce their own rules on all traffic, and exemptions vary and shift. The responsible standard — the one a compliance-first program holds to — is the strictest applicable window, verified with counsel.
| State | Window | Weekend | Notable rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 8am–8pm | No Sun/holidays | Solicitation-call limits |
| Arizona | 8am–9pm | — | No unsolicited texts to DNC numbers; up to $1,000 |
| Connecticut | 9am–8pm | — | Written consent; penalties to $20,000 |
| Florida | 8am–8pm | — | FTSA: written consent, 3 msgs/24h, $500/text (treble $1,500) |
| Kentucky | 10am–9pm | — | Later morning start |
| Louisiana | 8am–9pm | No Sunday | Sunday restriction |
| Maryland | 8am–8pm | — | Covers texts; 3 msgs/24h cap |
| Michigan | 9am–9pm | — | Later morning start |
| Minnesota | 9am–9pm | — | Later morning start |
| Oklahoma | 8am–8pm | — | Consent + 3 msgs/24h; $500/text |
| Oregon | 8am–8pm | — | HB 3865 (2026): 3 contacts/day |
| Pennsylvania | 8am–9pm | No Sun a.m. | Sunday restriction |
| Rhode Island | 8am–6pm | Sat ends 5pm | Tightest daily window |
| Tennessee | 9am–7pm | No Sun/holidays | Covers texts, ringless VM, AI calls (Oct 2026) |
| Texas | 9am–9pm | Noon–9pm Sun | SB 140: covers SMS, SoS registration, $5,000/violation |
| Utah | 8am–9pm | No Sunday | Sunday restriction |
| Virginia | 8am–9pm | — | STOP/UNSUBSCRIBE honored; opt-out kept 10 years |
| Washington | 8am–8pm | — | 8pm cutoff |
The direction is one-way: toward more regulation. Texas brought SMS under its statute in 2025 with $5,000-per-message exposure; Virginia's ten-year opt-out retention took effect in 2026; Oregon and Tennessee expanded in 2026; bills are moving in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Meanwhile, 2,588 TCPA lawsuits were filed in the first eleven months of 2025 alone. For a multi-state list, the only workable answer is per-recipient enforcement — each message gated against that voter's own state and local time.
Compliance is the killer
Every advantage in this report - the reach, the cost, the turnout lift, the fundraising - evaporates the moment a program cuts a compliance corner. In 2026, non-compliance is not a risk to manage. It is the single fastest way to kill a texting program.
The mechanism is a death spiral, and it runs on three tracks at once. Carriers filter you. A program blasting unconsented numbers builds a bad sender reputation, and carriers throttle or block the traffic, so the messages stop arriving at all. Devices filter you. Apple marks unknown senders as junk, and with roughly 70% of small-dollar money riding on text, an NRSC memo pegged the exposure at over $500 million across one party's campaigns. Courts punish you. The TCPA carries $500 to $1,500 per message, Texas now adds $5,000 per message under SB 140, and 2,588 TCPA suits were filed in the first eleven months of 2025.
The inversion is the whole strategic point of this report. The disciplines that look like friction - consent capture, per-recipient quiet hours, verified sending, honest pacing - are not the cost of doing texting. They are what keeps the channel working at all. Compliance is not the brake on a texting program. It is the engine. The campaigns that treat it as the floor keep the reach, the cost advantage, and the turnout lift. The ones that treat it as optional lose all three at once, usually in the final weeks, when it is too late to rebuild.
RCS is rewiring the channel
The biggest technical change to political texting in a decade happened quietly in September 2024, when Apple added RCS to the iPhone. It rewired the reach of the channel overnight.
Before iOS 18, RCS - the richer, verified, branded successor to SMS - reached only 4 to 5% of US phones, because it lived only on Android. After Apple's adoption, US RCS penetration jumped to roughly 70%, and more than a billion RCS messages now move through US phones every day.
US RCS penetration, before and after iOS 18
For campaigns, the significance is verified sending. On RCS a recipient sees the campaign's name, logo, and a verified checkmark instead of an anonymous ten-digit number, and verified RCS messages post read rates of 73 to 92% with far higher engagement than plain SMS. As carriers and devices filter harder, being a verified, branded sender is shifting from a nicety to the thing that determines whether a message is delivered or dropped. RCS falls back to SMS wherever it is not yet supported, so the move carries no downside in reach.
AI, labeled and accountable
Two shifts are changing what a text is and what it can do.
RCS — the richer, verified, branded successor to SMS — went mainstream as Apple added support on the iPhone, expanding the addressable base overnight. Verified sending, where a voter sees a campaign's name and logo instead of an anonymous ten-digit number, is becoming both a trust signal and a deliverability advantage as carriers filter harder. A message from a known, verified sender is one a filter is far less likely to catch and a voter far more likely to open.
AI moved into the workflow — drafting, summarizing, answering plain-language questions about program data — while regulators moved to keep it visible. State AI-disclosure laws are beginning to reach political messages, and the FCC's ban on AI voice robocalls signaled where texting rules are likely headed. The durable principle is AI that assists and is clearly labeled, never AI that operates in a campaign's name unseen.
Together these point one way: toward messaging that is richer, branded, verified, and accountable. Campaigns that adopt verified sending early gain both the trust dividend and the deliverability protection just as the filtering threat intensifies.
Device-level filtering is the counter-force
The same maturity that made texting reliable is now producing a serious threat to it: the phones themselves are starting to filter.
Apple commands roughly 58% of the US handset market, and its device-level message filtering is a direct hit to programs relying on unknown-sender texts. A leaked July 2025 NRSC memo, first reported by Punchbowl News and obtained by Business Insider, warned that iPhone filtering could cost that committee alone $25 million and drive more than $500 million in losses across Republican campaigns. That figure is the committee's own estimate — self-interested, and disputed by observers who note it assumes heavy reliance on unconsented sends — but the mechanism it describes is real and applies to any sender an unknown number, of either party.
This convergence — carrier enforcement, device filtering, and tightening state law at once — is why 2026 is the first national test of whether a campaign's texting program is built on consent and verification or on volume. The ones built on volume are the ones with $500 million at risk.
What a winning program does now
The environment ahead rewards discipline. Five principles separate the programs that will thrive from the ones about to be filtered, sued, or tuned out.
None of this is exotic. It is what compliance-first, consent-based texting looks like — the discipline that used to be optional and, in 2026, is the price of staying in the inbox at all.
Methodology & sources
Candidate and race data. Counts are from Txtra's 2026 database, compiled from official state candidate filings and standard election references, covering statewide and federal general-election candidates. They exclude write-in candidates and de-duplicate incumbents who were renominated (counted once). "Offices" counts distinct contests; "candidates" counts unique general-election candidates.
Reach. Wireless-only household figures are from the CDC's National Health Interview Survey Early Release program, headline figure through the second half of 2024.
On partisan spending. Estimates of how much each party spends on texting vary by method and source; we report the vendor-market total and note the disagreement rather than a single party ratio. The NRSC's $500M figure is that committee's own estimate.
Market and adoption. Messaging-market and SMS-marketing figures are from published A2P and SMS-marketing analyses (Dimension Market Research and industry reports, 2025–2026). Fundraising and adoption figures are from ActBlue and WinRed disclosures, M+R Benchmarks 2025, NonProfit PRO benchmarks, eMarketer, and FEC data as compiled in 2026 industry analysis. Political text-volume estimates are from Robokiller and RumbleUp / Campaign Verify.
Regulation. State contact-window and mini-TCPA details are drawn from 2026 industry compliance references summarizing state telemarketing and mini-TCPA statutes. These are commercial-solicitation rules; political-message exemptions vary by state, and nothing here is legal advice.
Figures reflect the 2026 cycle as of publication (September 2026) and are subject to revision as filings, ratings, and rules change. © 2026 Txtra · Prepared by Txtra Research.