The spam and the scam: What's driving those incessant political fundraising email and text campaigns blowing up your inbox

• Each and every day, political campaigns send out fundraising requests via email and text messages.
• Even the progressive and conservative groups helping with the messages admit the constant barrage can be burdensome.

Michael Escobar receives over a dozen emails a week from campaigns and political groups, which are slowly filling up his inbox.

"It's definitely started to get annoying," Escobar said, noting that it feels like "the spam equivalent of a high pressure sales pitch at a mattress or guitar store."

He often receives the same messages, over and over, sometimes with an "ever-escalating tone" which he said makes him less likely to donate at all.

Escobar said he sometimes even gets emails from campaigns in other states from politicians he's never heard of. The campaign's goal may be to bring in donations, but to Escobar, it simply pushes him away.

"The mere fact I received the message makes me unsympathetic. I'd rather be inspired to donate by reading news coverage about them from a source I trust"

He's not the only one frustrated by these messages.

Amanda, a federal attorney, told Insider that she also receives an obscene amount of emails and texts from campaigns.

"Every so often, a new one pops up from someone who I've never even heard of," the attorney told Insider. "I assume that my information is being sold or exchanged to other campaigns."

And while she's tried unsubscribing from the barrage of messages from campaigns, it hasn't been enough.

"It's like a little bit of extra annoyance on top of life," she added.

Increasingly, consumers are drowning in a sea of spam messages and scams from political campaigns, and experts said it's not going to change anytime soon.

For one, the very business model of campaigning means that a key asset of a debt-laden campaign post-election is its email list, opening up the people on it to subsequent unwanted spam.

Secondly, some campaigns have begun to turn to misleading, scammy tactics within those emails, promising matches that never happen and peril that isn't real.

And while they themselves said they get annoyed by the flood of spam messages, political campaigners said that annoying voters is simply part of the job.

The spam: How you got on that pesky mailing list

"By spamming, I'm referring to sending unsolicited emails or text messages in bulk to people who didn't sign up to get them," said Josh Nelson, CEO of the progressive email and SMS acquisition platform Civic Shout.

He explained there are companies whose "entire business model" is to sell donor contact information to campaigns and agencies that work on their behalf.

Rory McShane, the founder of McShane LLC, a conservative political consulting and fundraising group, told Insider that campaign donors are often knowingly or unknowingly consenting their contact information being shared by the campaign with others.

"Most of the time when you make a contribution you are not only consenting to have the campaign that you're contributing to or the organization you're contributing to text you," McShane said. "You're also consenting to allow your information to be shared, rented, given away, and so on and so forth."

McShane explained that sometimes when a campaign is in debt following an election, it'll sell its donor's contact information to vendors to alleviate some of the debt. Other times, he said, campaigns sometimes share their fundraising databases with campaigns they've endorsed.

The scammy side of political emails

As Nelson elaborated, "The scamming side is what I think of as sort of the deceptive, extremely hyperbolic, deeply misleading, and sometimes even borderline fraudulent emails."

He said he characterizes some of the tactics campaign fundraisers use as "manipulative." These can include fake surveys, arbitrary hyped-up deadlines, inaccurate claims about the financial resources of adversaries, claims of a donor match that is utterly made up, and manipulative use of recurring donations.

"They ask you to take a survey and the last question on the survey is, can you donate? And all the options are yes."

Nelson cited a number of examples of other manipulative tactics campaigns tend to use, like times when they say an anonymous donor will do an egregiously-high percentage match to someone's donation, like 500%, that never ultimately occurs.

He noted there've also been instances of campaigns tricking donors into signing up for recurring donations when they only meant to donate once.

Such a situation occurred in the 2020 election cycle when large numbers of donors — many of whom were elderly — accidentally donated thousands of dollars more than expected to President Donald Trump's campaign.

The regulations behind the messages aren't designed to limit volume, just content

There are certain rules and regulations that campaigns must follow when sending texts and emails.

On the email side, there's the CAN-SPAM Act, a law that went into place in 2003 that set standards for commercial services using email. These standards include forbidding companies from spoofing email headers, prohibiting deceptive subject lines, requiring senders to identify the email as an advertisement, and requiring companies to provide recipients a way to opt out of the email list.

According to Anne Mitchell, an attorney and CEO of the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy who wrote part of the CAN-SPAM Act, the law also applies to political campaigns. She said there's no exemption made in the law for emails that are political in nature.

Campaigns blasting spam emails almost got much worse. After the RNC repeatedly lobbied Google to drop its spam filter for political spam, the company briefly acquiesced before changing its mind after the 2022 midterm elections.

As for mass-sending text messages, Mitchell explained, campaigns must abide by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. While campaigns normally need a person's consent to send them messages, the FCC notes that if the campaign manually dials the recipient's number into the phone, it can send messages "without the intended recipient's prior consent."

Spamming voters is considered an inevitable cost of doing political business

Fundraisers and political consultants from both sides of the aisle are well aware that their fundraising tactics can sometimes be a little excessive and even annoying.

Insider asked political strategists whether there was a "right" way of going about fundraising and not bothering people or if it's accepted that some people are going to be burdened by the incessant messages.

Nick Daggers, a founding partner with the 1833 Group — which partners with Democratic campaigns — said, "I think, unfortunately, it's the latter."

McShane, the GOP consultant and founder of a group whose services sent approximately 60 million text messages last election cycle, agreed with Daggers.

"It's an accepted part of fundraising that you're going to ruffle feathers," McShane said.

The messages even get a little too much for the fundraisers themselves to deal with.

"I've been going through a personal email purge recently where anytime I get an email, I'm just like, opting out, opting out, opting out," Daggers said. "Even yesterday I got one from a congressman from out of state that I've never given money to, and I've never been on their website."