Political Text Messaging with Scott Goodstein: What’s Changed, What’s Broken, and What Comes Next

Since our last conversation, political text messaging has grown dramatically. From your perspective, what are the biggest changes in how campaigns are using text messaging, and how are voters reacting?

Scott Goodstein: Looking across our broader coverage, the rise of political text messaging fits squarely into what we call the Annoyance Economy, a system where campaigns optimize for reach and short-term returns at the expense of user experience and long-term trust.

The biggest shift is not just scale, it is incentives. Campaigns, consultants, and vendors are now rewarded for volume over value. Texting has become one of the cheapest and fastest ways to reach voters, so it is being overused, especially for fundraising and persuasion. The result is a flood of unsolicited, repetitive, and low-quality messages hitting the same voters across multiple campaigns.

From the voter’s perspective, this feels less like engagement and more like constant interruption.

This is why the Annoyance Economy matters. Like spam calls or junk fees, political text spam creates friction and frustration. It erodes attention, patience, and trust.

The consequences are clear. Voters begin to ignore all political texts, including legitimate ones. Important information gets lost. Lower propensity voters are more likely to disengage. The overall ecosystem becomes more vulnerable to misinformation because everything starts to look the same.

This is not just an evolution in messaging, it is a degradation of the channel.

If this continues, texting will become the political equivalent of robocalls, widely used, deeply disliked, and increasingly ineffective. The opportunity is to return to permission-based, value-driven communication that respects voters’ time and attention.

Political texts are increasingly being used to spread misleading or false information. What makes this channel particularly vulnerable compared to social media?

Scott Goodstein: Text messaging is especially vulnerable because it combines high trust, low transparency, and very limited oversight.

First, there is the issue of trust. Text messages appear alongside conversations with friends and family, so people are more likely to take them seriously. Unlike social media, where users expect noise and competing narratives, a text can feel personal and credible even when it is not.

Second, there is almost no public accountability. Social platforms allow misinformation to be seen, reported, and challenged in real time. Text messages are private and largely invisible, so misleading information can spread widely without scrutiny.

Third, enforcement gaps make it easy for bad actors to operate. Messages can be sent from changing numbers, which makes them difficult to trace or stop.

Finally, texts demand immediate attention. That urgency can be exploited, especially close to an election, when there is little time to verify information.

Together, these factors make text messaging a powerful and underregulated channel for misinformation.

You’ve highlighted how rumors can spread faster than facts online. How does political text messaging contribute to echo chambers, and what impact does that have on voter trust?

Scott Goodstein: Political text messaging contributes to echo chambers by delivering highly targeted messages directly to specific groups of voters without any outside visibility or counterbalance.

Unlike social media, where people may still encounter opposing views, text campaigns can segment audiences and send tailored narratives that reinforce existing beliefs. That becomes even more dangerous when combined with misinformation or, in some cases, racially charged or deceptive messages that are designed to inflame or divide.

We have already seen examples of racist and misleading political text blasts sent across multiple states, showing how easy it is for bad actors to exploit this channel at scale.

Because these messages are private, recipients often have no way to verify them or see how widely they are being distributed, which allows false information to feel more credible and more widespread than it actually is.

The impact on voter trust is significant. Over time, people begin to distrust not just the messages, but the entire system delivering them. It creates a feedback loop where voters retreat further into their own information bubbles while becoming more skeptical of everything they receive.

In the end, it is not just about misinformation spreading faster. It is about trust breaking down faster, which poses a real risk to civic engagement and democratic participation.

Originally, political texting was about engagement, not just broadcasting messages. How has the shift toward one-way messaging affected the effectiveness and credibility of campaigns?

Scott Goodstein: Originally, political texting worked because it felt like a conversation. It was opt-in, interactive, and focused on helping people take action, whether that meant finding their polling place, volunteering, or getting involved.

On the Obama campaign, we even built the technology to manually respond to serious questions that came in through our shortcode, 62262. That allowed us to create real dialogue with supporters and treat texting as a two-way organizing tool, not just a broadcast channel.

At the time, there were also real barriers to entry. Registering and maintaining a shortcode was expensive and required coordination with carriers, which created a level of accountability. Today, that has changed. Anyone can register a ten-digit number and use modern platforms to send messages at scale to targeted voter lists.

The shift to one-way messaging has changed the dynamic completely.

Today, much of political texting is broadcast-driven, focused on volume rather than dialogue. Modern peer-to-peer systems are often used as one-directional spam tools, where messages go out at scale with little to no meaningful response on the other end.

This has had a clear impact on effectiveness. When every campaign is sending high volumes of similar messages, the channel becomes saturated, and response rates decline. What once cut through the noise is now part of it.

It also hurts credibility. When messages feel impersonal or unsolicited, voters begin to question who is contacting them and why. Over time, that erodes trust not just in a specific campaign, but in political communication more broadly.

In short, the move from conversation to broadcast has turned texting from a relationship-building tool into a transactional one, and that shift is making it less effective and less trusted.

Social listening tools have improved tracking on platforms like TikTok and X. How could similar strategies be applied to political texting to identify misleading or harmful messages before they reach a wide audience?

Scott Goodstein: Harmful messages can spread quickly (and already have) through text messaging with almost no visibility or early warning system. To address this, we need to apply social listening principles to texting.

First, create a shared reporting system that allows voters to forward suspicious messages, enabling patterns to be identified across campaigns and states.

Second, use pattern recognition and keyword analysis to detect coordinated messaging and spikes in harmful narratives early.

Third, require greater oversight of carriers and aggregators. Because telecom providers control delivery, they can flag or slow the spread of known harmful content.

Fourth, establish a permanent do-not-text list with real enforcement, including meaningful fines for violations, so voters who opt out are actually protected across campaigns and data brokers.

Finally, increase transparency by building a public database of political text messages so journalists and researchers can track what is being sent and by whom.

The lesson is simple. Without visibility, bad actors can scale quickly. With monitoring, enforcement, and transparency, we can create earlier detection and real accountability.

AI is creating both opportunities and risks in digital communication. How do you see AI influencing political text messaging, especially in spreading disinformation or automating content at scale?

Scott Goodstein: AI is going to accelerate both the power and the problems of political text messaging.

On the opportunity side, AI can help campaigns be more responsive, analyze sentiment faster, and deliver more relevant information to voters. Used responsibly, it could actually improve engagement by making communication more timely and useful.

But the risks are far more immediate.

AI dramatically lowers the cost and effort required to produce high volumes of hyper-targeted content. Campaigns and outside groups can now generate thousands of message variations tailored to specific demographics, geographies, or behavioral profiles. That makes persuasion more efficient, but it also makes disinformation more scalable and harder to detect.

It also increases the risk of synthetic and deceptive messaging. AI can generate texts that sound authentic, urgent, and locally relevant, even when they are false. Combined with the private and trusted nature of texting, that creates a powerful environment for misleading information to spread without scrutiny.

We are also seeing the rise of automated conversational systems that simulate real human interaction. What used to require trained volunteers responding to voters can now be handled by AI, which raises serious questions about transparency and authenticity. Voters may think they are engaging with a real person when they are not.

All of this feeds into the broader Annoyance Economy dynamic. AI makes it easier to flood the zone with content, which risks further degrading the channel and pushing voters to tune everything out.

The bottom line is that AI will make political texting faster, cheaper, and more personalized, but without stronger rules and norms, it will also make it easier to mislead, manipulate, and overwhelm voters at scale.

Are current rules and platform policies equipped to handle the speed and scale of modern political texting, or do we need new solutions to protect voters?

Scott Goodstein: No. And Yes.

What ethical standards or best practices should campaigns adopt for text messaging, even if they go beyond what’s legally required, to maintain voter trust and avoid spreading false information?

Scott Goodstein: After the Obama Campaign, I worked to push the FCC to modernize its interpretation of the TCPA and close loopholes around automated and mass texting. There was real momentum toward requiring clearer consent standards and treating large-scale texting programs more like the broadcast systems they actually are, not as one-to-one conversations.

After years of lobbying and thousands of dollars spent, the FCC ruled in my favor in 2015 and declared that bulk political texting without consent could fall under existing restrictions, limiting unsolicited outreach and forcing campaigns to adopt opt-in models similar to what we built in 2008.

But that direction changed.

Under the first Trump administration, the Peer-to-Peer Industry created a lobbying association and pushed the FCC to reinterpret and narrow those rules, carving out space for P2P texting to operate outside stricter autodialer definitions. By framing these systems as “manual” or “human-initiated,” they were able to preserve a pathway for campaigns and vendors to send large volumes of messages without prior consent. These rule changes resulted in the system we have today… A regulatory framework that acknowledges the problem but lacks the teeth to stop it.

There is no centralized accountability. Messages move across carriers, aggregators, vendors, and campaigns, making it difficult to monitor or shut down harmful activity in real time. Enforcement is limited, and penalties are often too weak to deter bad actors.

We also rely too heavily on opt-outs and complaints, which puts the burden on voters after they have already been spammed.

We need new solutions.

That means stronger enforcement of consent, a permanent do-not-text list with real penalties, more accountability at the carrier level, and greater transparency into who is sending political messages.

Without these updates, the gap between technology and regulation will continue to grow, and voters will continue to pay the price through confusion, frustration, and declining trust.

If a campaign wanted to use political texting responsibly today, what practical changes would you recommend immediately, in content, targeting, and oversight?

Scott Goodstein: If a campaign wants to use texting responsibly today, it needs to return to the fundamentals of permission, value, and accountability.

First, on content, every message should be useful, honest, and respectful of people’s attention. That means fewer fundraising blasts and more information that actually helps voters, such as voting details, event access, or ways to get involved. Campaigns should also clearly identify who they are in every message and avoid manipulative urgency.

Second, on targeting, campaigns should prioritize opt-in audiences and high-intent supporters. Just because you can text a voter file does not mean you should. Focus on people who have raised their hand, engaged previously, or have a real relationship with the campaign.

Third, rebuild two-way engagement. Texting should not be a one-directional broadcast. Campaigns should invest in systems, whether human or AI-assisted, that allow real responses to voter questions, similar to what we built on the Obama campaign with shortcode 62262.

Fourth, put real compliance and oversight in place from the start. That means honoring opt-outs across all vendors, maintaining internal do-not-text lists, auditing message content, and monitoring for misinformation risks. Campaigns should also register their code with both Campaign Verify and The Campaign Registry so carriers and voters have more confidence in who is sending the message.

Finally, measure success differently. Do not just track how many messages were sent or how much money was raised. Focus on trust, engagement, and long-term relationship building.

The campaigns that get this right will treat texting not as a shortcut to scale, but as a direct line to voters that needs to be earned and respected.

If these challenges aren’t addressed, where do you see political text messaging heading in the next election cycle, and what could that mean for voter engagement and democracy?

Scott Goodstein: If these challenges are not addressed, political text messaging is heading toward oversaturation and declining effectiveness.

We are already seeing signs of it. Voters are overwhelmed, response rates are dropping, and trust is eroding. If the volume continues to increase, texting will follow the same path as robocalls. It will become widely used, widely ignored, and widely disliked.

That has real consequences.

Important information will get lost in the noise. Voters will become more skeptical of every message they receive, whether or not it is legitimate. Lower-propensity voters, who require the most thoughtful outreach, will be most likely to disengage.

At the same time, the channel will become even more attractive to bad actors. With little oversight and high reach, text messaging will continue to be used for misinformation, manipulation, and targeted suppression tactics.

The bigger risk is not just inefficiency. It is a breakdown in trust.

When voters cannot tell what is real, who is contacting them, or whether a message is credible, they begin to tune out entirely. That weakens civic participation and makes it harder to run fair and effective campaigns.

The path forward is still there. Texting can be a powerful tool for engagement if it returns to permission-based communication, transparency, and real accountability.

If not, it risks becoming just another broken channel in an already fragmented information environment, and that has serious implications for voter engagement and democracy.

Read More of Scott Goodstein’s opinions about this subject at:

• An Interview With Scott Goodstein About Political Text Messaging
• 10,000 Hours: A political messaging revolutionary
• How the FCC can protect consumers from unwanted political text message spam