I’m happy with the election results, but please stop asking for money

James Talarico’s election to the US Senate from Texas is thrilling. I hope to live long enough to vote for him for president. But it sure was annoying to get three or four text messages and emails a day from his campaign.

Talarico said he needed money to counter the massive amount Republicans were spending on advertising. The pleas worked; I sent a donation. The appeals didn’t stop. Every time my phone dinged, I guessed it was Talarico again — and it often was. 

Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries also texted for money to support Democratic congressional candidates, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker solicited for ActBlue, but not so often.

The askers must have gotten my phone number and email address from past Democratic campaigns. Democrats apparently share freely.

I contributed to Talarico thinking I’d feel guilty if he lost. But how much does advertising matter in a political race? 

The evidence, I found, is nuanced. 

“If you correlate ad buys at the market level with county-level vote returns, which we've been doing for a long time, we tend to find very small effects,” Mike Franz, codirector of the Wesleyan Media Project, told attendees at WMP’s 2024 postelection conference. WMP tracks US political advertising. 

Note that Franz said “very small effects.” In a close race, “small does not mean inconsequential,” Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA political scientist, told The New Republic.

“If TV commercials manage to sway one or two voters out of every 1,000 who watch them, you start to have the margin” in a tight race, said Brett Gordon, a marketing professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. 

Consider that in the 2000 presidential election Al Gore lost Florida by 537 votes out of 5,963,110 cast. That’s not even 1 in 11,000 votes. Of course we can’t know whether more or different advertising would have flipped those few hundred votes, but campaigns won’t risk advertising less in tight races.

Up until the end many pollsters said the Senate race in Texas was a toss-up, and the state hadn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988, so I don’t feel foolish about contributing to Talarico. But I also feel justified about being annoyed by the incessant texts and emails.

The Center for Campaign Innovation found that even party activists express frustration with the number of appeals they receive, according to an article in Politico. Reporter Jessica Piper wrote that digital solicitations by political campaigns have become indiscriminate and are getting backlash from overwhelmed recipients. 

“The negative feedback from donors, coupled with lower return rates, might seem like a factor that would give campaigns pause,” Piper wrote. But nothing is likely to change soon: “Mass texting and email programs still turn a profit, and no single campaign has the incentive or the power to change anything.”

With the election over, I’d like a break, but now multiple appeals are coming from Hakeem Jeffries. The presumed next speaker sent a text last evening right after Democrats took the House. He wanted $25 toward expected recounts. This morning Jeffries texted again, starting out “It’s Hakeem.” 

Although it feels disloyal, I replied “STOP.” I’m seriously close to being turned off.