Inside the 2020 campaign messaging war that’s pelting our phones with texts

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• The main reason texts can reach so many voters and motivate supporters is because while most people screen phone calls, especially from numbers they don’t know, they associate texts with people close to them like friends and family.

• ampaign typically starts with a list of cellphone numbers taken from a voter file it leases from the party. The voter file contains voter-provided phone numbers, email add

• Democrats were the first to discover the goodness of P2P texting. Back in the fall of 2014, an ex-Facebook employee named Roddy Lindsay was volunteering at the immigration nonprofit FWD.us, when a few of the organizers began using text messaging to contact supporters and invite them to events. “It turned out to be a really effective way to do that,” Lindsay told Recode in 2016. “We got people who never opened their emails to respond to a text.'”