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Political Candidates Reach Out to Voters With Text Messages

by Amar Toor on October 4, 2010 at 01:30 PM

roy blunt's texting campaign
With mid-term elections rearing their ugly head this fall, Congressional incumbents and challengers alike are doing everything they can to squeeze every possible vote out of their constituents. This season, though, candidates have added an extra weapon to their campaign arsenal: text messages.

Democratic Senatorial candidate Robin Carnahan, for example, has begun posting signs around Missouri, asking voters to text specific codes to the politician's office. With each text she receives, Carnahan stores the phone number in a massive text-message database, which she then uses to send campaign messages directly to voters. Meanwhile, Carnahan's Republican opponent, Representative Roy Blunt, has been driving around the state in a blue RV with the slogan "Text JOBS to BLUNT" written on it.

While texting may not be the most cutting edge of technological mediums, many politicians consider it to be something of a new frontier in campaigning. Snail mail, of course, has been dead to campaigners for years, but many calls to landlines are now going unanswered as more people shift to completely wireless modes of communication. The text message, on the other hand, offers politicians a way to instantly get the attention of targeted voters who would likely toss similarly propagandist e-mails into their junk folders. "From a campaign's perspective, texts are great, because there's a really high open rate for those," Carnahan tells the Washington Post. "They pop up on your phone, so it's really easy to communicate with people quickly and know that they're seeing that piece of information."

Widespread text-based campaigns, however, aren't without their costs. Each text a politician sends can cost him or her anywhere from a few pennies to a dime, meaning that many candidates must plaster their text advertisements all over town if they want to profit from the venture. And, instead of going after swing voters, many politicians are targeting die-hard political junkies with their texts, in the hopes that they may tell their friends and influence others. Yet, many candidates still haven't gotten around to syncing their text campaigns with other forms of mass media -- something that ArX Mobile President and CEO Phil Sweatman considers a missed opportunity. "The political campaigns don't quite get it yet," Sweatman says. "In order to make text messaging effective, you can't look at it as a standalone technology -- it's got to be integrated with all your other marketing media."

Tags: campaign, cellphone, cellphones, election, HouseOfRepresentatives, midtermelections, politics, Senate, Texting, top, voters

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