How ‘urgent’ texts pushed these donors to give thousands of times to political candidates

Sandra has always been active in elections.

When she lived in Texas, she served as a poll worker and she continued volunteering when she moved to Orange County around 2016. But this year, she was too busy to complete the training. Leading up to the election, her days were consumed by what she calls a full-time, unpaid job: Reading and responding to texts and emails from political candidates.

By around noon on a recent day, Sandra, 88, said she’d already received 125 text messages asking for donations to a campaign. More often than not, she ends up sending some money to the cause.

“I’ve been at this all morning, since early morning today, and I’m trying to finish it up right now, because I got too many things I gotta do,” Sandra said. “This has been going on nonstop, once they get a hold of you. I started out with just a couple people, and then it spread. ‘Well, can you please help this senator? Please help this congressman?’”

Since the election cycle began in January 2023, she’s given an average of twelve times per day, typically around $20 each. That adds up to at least 8,300 individual donations. In total, Sandra has contributed $166,000 during this election cycle, with 50% going to Donald Trump.

Prompted by an overwhelming number of texts and emails, Sandra represents a new kind of political donor: one who gives in fairly small amounts, sometimes as little as a dollar, over and over again. More than 13,500 Americans are frequent donors who have made one or more contributions per day, on average, in this cycle, according to a Times analysis of campaign finance records from WinRed and ActBlue, the fundraising platforms used by most Republican and Democratic campaigns.

Even though the number of donors to ActBlue and WinRed declined in 2024 compared to 2020, the two platforms both saw an increase in frequent donors. WinRed’s count of frequent donors increased more than 740% to surpass ActBlue’s count, which increased by 14%. To protect their privacy, The Times is not publishing the full names of donors or family members included in this article.

Frequent donors’ contributions can add up. Campaigns band together through joint fundraising committees to distribute donations that go well beyond the limit that any individual could donate through a candidate committee alone.

Despite being just 0.2% of WinRed’s donors, these extremely frequent donors account for a quarter of transactions and add up to 8% of its overall fundraising. In 2020, frequent donors were just 1.7% of WinRed fundraising. For ActBlue, frequent donors made up 3.6% of overall funding, up from 2.4% in 2020.

Campaigns are counting on this kind of response from frequent donors, who increasingly make up a greater proportion of overall fundraising. Among committees with more than 100,000 contributions, the biggest beneficiary on the right was Rep. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills), who won California’s 40th Congressional District, which includes parts of Orange County. Frequent donors made up 35% of her WinRed fundraising. On the left, Occupy Democrats received 31% of their ActBlue funds from frequent donors.

Kamala Harris’ campaign committee and PAC received 1% of its funds from frequent donors. Trump’s PACs received 3% and 5% from frequent donors.

The campaign texts are typically designed to feel unique and urgent. To Sandra, they reflect a personal relationship that she says she has developed with federal, state and local candidates. Their texts ask her to help them by responding to a survey, reading some information, and consider donating through a unique code which, to her, indicates a high level of security.

She joked in response to a message that asked, “What would you say to President Trump if you could talk to him for 5 minutes?” That the question didn’t make a lot of sense — she talks to him just about every day. “He’s probably the first text I get and the last text I get.”

According to an analysis by YouMail, a robocall blocking service, Republicans have sent more fundraising messages than Democrats. Both parties seize on big news events, such as a party switching candidates or a criminal conviction, with a surge of texts.

“It’s really clear that when you see the numbers released for the fundraising dollars, it correlates to those huge high levels of text messages,” said Alex Quilici, chief executive of YouMail. He added that robocalls are down because people tend to ignore them. With texts, however, it is easy to just click through to do something.

“Our estimate is that every voter in America is, on average, getting one to four texts a week.” Quilici said.

According to Quilici’s data, the most messages come from the 88022 shortcode used by the Trump campaign, second only to Temu in terms of volume and ahead of CVS, USPS and Walmart. He estimates that this number sent between 4 million to 8 million messages per day from mid-September to mid-October. A Times reporter texted this number and, having never since responded or donated, has since received at least five messages per day.

Democratic campaigns also rely on frequent donors.

Gary, a former lawyer and lobbyist living in Santa Fe, N.M., has given more than 12,000 times since the election cycle began, mainly to left-leaning groups such as the Retired Americans PAC and the Elect Diverse Democrats PAC.

Gary, 82, said that his daughter Hilary thinks he makes too many contributions. “My typical day now, the way it is, [the donations are] small, you know, they’ll be less than $10 or something like that. But my daughter goes, ‘Well, you gave too much money today.’”

Hilary has access to his bank account so she can see and track each transaction as it goes through. She said her dad sometimes forgets that he had already given that day. His donations sometimes exceed 60 per day.

Hilary has noticed an increase in her father’s donations since her mom passed away in 2019. In that year, he had just 18 contributions. In 2020, nearly 1,400 contributions. After an active life of traveling, scuba diving and skiing with his wife, he now has less to fill his days, and these messages let him feel involved, she said. She hopes that they will stop after the election — or at least she wishes that campaigns “would recognize, like, OK, he donated today. We’re not going to continue sending [messages].”

Gary’s daughter Hilary is concerned he is spending too much money and is being consumed by text messages.

(Roberto E. Rosales / For The Times)

Like Sandra, Gary receives many texts and emails each day. Hilary said he “responds to all of them and gives his money.”

“He thinks every time he gets an email, they’re directly contacting him,” she added. Her father has shared concerns about the messages with her saying, “They’re telling me I have to [donate]. They’re telling me they think that I like Trump now.”

When he complains to her that he has no money, she reminds him that he is giving thousands a month through these small contributions. Over the course of this election cycle, Gary has contributed nearly $62,000, mostly split across thousands of $5 donations.

“When you split the price of something out into multiple pieces or multiple fees, people are likely to pay a lot more,” said Erin Witte, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America.

Campaigns often ask for a small amount of money, $5 or even just $1. But on the donation page to complete that small transaction is a maze of checkboxes that, when checked, will automatically repeat the donation again on a certain day or on a regular basis.

The combination of recurring donations with the personal connection to candidates can mean that the flood of texts leads to extremely frequent donations and ever-increasing contribution totals. Witte said she doesn’t know if this is inherently abusive but pointed to the fact that the system is designed to target people that respond and takes advantage of some cognitive biases.

But it is not illegal.

“Texts weren’t around 50 years ago when we started thinking about political campaigns,” said Witte, noting that political campaigns are exempt from certain parts of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the Do Not Call Registry. That means it can be difficult to get the messages to stop. And when someone starts engaging with a campaign, their information is often shared with others.

Politics

2024 U.S. elections results

See how the latest national vote counts for the President, Senate, Congress and Governors races change the balance of power.

Nov. 5, 2024

Brian Hughes, a senior advisor for the Trump campaign, defended the fundraising strategy.

“President Trump’s campaign is proudly fueled by small-dollar donors,” Hughes said. “We strive to be direct and transparent by informing them immediately when they have registered for recurring donations, sending a notice three days before processing, notifying them when the processing is complete, and having staff on hand to assist with refunds and cancellations.”

Sandra said that she used to receive notices about transactions but no longer does. WinRed’s website states that donors can request refunds for mistaken donations up to 60 days after the contribution date. The company did not respond for comment.

ActBlue honors refund requests within 90 days, and for contributions older than that, they will attempt to recover the funds from the committee. In situations where a caregiver needs to request a refund on behalf of another person, ActBlue has established an elevated care team. This team can work with a power of attorney or other caregiver to handle refunds, cancel recurring contributions, close accounts and even issue a block on all future donations associated with an email address.

“We understand that each donor’s situation is unique and, when a concern is raised, ActBlue works to resolve the issue with empathy and efficiency,” said Megan Hughes, the organization’s communications director.

Campaigns do not stop sending fundraising messages to donors, even after they’ve hit contribution limits. In fact, they can maximize their donations through joint fundraising committees. These allow for complex ways of shifting money between participating committees to increase the amount that a donor can give after hitting the Federal Election Commission limit on any individual committee.

At first, all of Sandra’s presidential donations went to Trump’s Save America political action committee. The fine print on the contribution page states that this is a joint fundraising committee on behalf of his candidate committee and his Save America PAC. Over the course of the election cycle, a single donor could contribute up to $23,200 to the participating committees and recount funds.

In April, as Sandra approached the limit, her contributions started going to the newly launched Trump National Committee. This partnership between Trump’s candidate committee and the Republican National Committee has a much higher contribution ceiling of $150,000 per year because of higher party committee limits.

Brett Kappel, a lawyer with deep experience in campaign finance, said that there are no incentives for fundraising committees to communicate with the campaigns to stop messaging donors who have reached their limits. Instead, committees are allowed to keep excessive contributions in their accounts for 60 days, during which time they can earn interest or be invested. And recurring donations can continue long after the election is over, as long as the fundraising committee is still active.

Rather than tracking excessive contributions, some committees wait until the FEC sends them a letter before either transferring or refunding donations, Kappel said.

Sandra was pleased to see many of the candidates that she supported win their seats as she watched the election night results come in with some friends. She said now that the election is over, she plans to cut back on donating. But the habit of responding to the messages could be hard to break. There is always another election around the corner. In an effort to keep track of her contributions, Sandra said she keeps hard copies of each transaction.

“So my volume of paper alone is huge,” she said. “This is why I’m glad to see it ending, so I can get rid of all this stuff. And then I’m never going to do this again.”