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Election years are full of uncertainty, but 2024 — with its major-party candidate switch — is exceptionally so. 

As we inch closer to Election Day, more questions arise: What polls should I trust? What exactly are the poll numbers telling me? And what is up with all these texts I’m getting from campaigns, begging me for money? We answer those questions and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s go-to hotline for all your questions.

The panicked texts Anne and her friends are receiving, each one seeming more desperate than the last, have been a hot topic as of late in her group chat. Anne lives in Chicago and considers herself moderately politically active — she’s more likely to talk to her local alderman about housing than be active in a political party on the national level, yet the texts keep pouring in. 

“I am dying for somebody to do a deep dive about these unhinged text messages that we keep getting,” she says. “Do these actually work?”

It turns out, they do. According to Lloyd Cotler, the founder of Banter Messaging — a company that does text campaigns for progressive organizations — they get a lot of bang for their buck. 

“It’s partially because texting is so cheap. Each text is a couple of pennies,” he says. “A well-done text marketing program can be really good at fundraising.”

Banter is not in the business of fundraising; if you get a text from them, it’s more likely to be a call to action than an ask for money. But there are lots of other companies that do fundraising work. Often, these consultants are hired by campaigns and political action committees. 

According to Cotler, however, not all PACs are created equal. While some fundraise on behalf of candidates and causes, others give just a fraction of what they bring in to politicians, the rest going to overhead, padding the salaries of those running the PAC. 

How do they get away with this? And how do they get voters’ contact information in the first place? We answer all that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

The campaign will get started with an agency. They will take either your existing supporters or they will buy data from folks. And then they'll just kind of start texting.

There are a few different ways, ranging from banal to nefarious. The most basic way is just buying your data. They're just getting it from another campaign, or another PAC, or another agency that sells campaign donor data. That's just kind of the regular course of business. 

So, they got your email because you signed up for something or they had your email when the candidate ran six years ago, but you never gave them more info. Then they do a data append and get additional info on you,  and then they start texting you from the phone number they got, which may or may not be accurate. That’s why a lot of people get messages that are addressed to somebody else. They can also get it from the voter file. 

And then the most nefarious way would be scraping [Federal Election Commission] data, which is very illegal, but only if you got caught. 

It should be illegal. The really gross part is that the agency will work on behalf of multiple clients and facilitate the sale of the data between their own clients. So you're getting, from the same agency, eight identical messages from eight different candidates because they're just copying and pasting their stuff over and sending it to you over and over.

It takes, like, a full day's worth of research. The average person is totally unequipped to do it, to be honest. You first have to figure out who this is actually from. Then you've got to look at the PAC and who it’s supporting. Then you can go to FEC and look up the PAC or whoever it is from there. And then it still might not paint the whole picture.

A campaign or a PAC showing 80 percent of its money spent on overhead doesn't tell the whole story because it could be that they're just passing the money through to candidates directly. And so that would be legitimate.

But you couldn't tell that from an FEC report. It's a lot of digging for people to do. Which is why I always tell people if you want to support a campaign, go directly to their website and make a donation. If you write a check, you will not get spam text messages for quite awhile.

The first thing you can do is make sure you're on the National Do Not Call Registry. That's not going to do anything, but it does give you standing to file a Telephone Consumer Protection Act demand. 

Then I tell everybody the best thing you can do is start suing. Sending TCPA demand letters to folks who are texting you repeatedly if you are on the Do Not Call Registry is a really easy way to get them to stop because those TCPA fines are really expensive, so they will settle. 

Generally you will get paid and then you will stop getting those messages because they will start blacklisting your number. Anybody can do it. And the more people that do it, the bigger the damage is on the fundraising side, the more they will have to reexamine if this is a viable channel. 

You can also copy and paste the full text of the message and send it to 7726 — which spells out spam — and that directs it to the [Federal Communications Commission].

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For this episode, I also spoke to Vox senior politics reporter Christian Paz about polling. You can check out the podcast for our full conversation, but an interesting piece that ended up on the cutting room floor was a rundown of the polling he trusts. Where are the different places he goes to look at the data?

His trick is to look at several different sources. Each of these polls, he says, uses different methods from phone surveys to online appeals, “kind of canceling out a little bit of the error or uncertainty that they might get from just doing their polls one way or another,” he says. “That kind of variety makes your overall analysis and understanding of polls stronger.” Here's where he looks: 

National Polling

New York Times/Siena College

Quinnipiac University 

ABC/Washington Post

The Economist/YouGov

Echelon Insights

Regional

Marquette University

Susquehanna Polling and Research

Suffolk University 

Ann Selzer 

Specific Demographics 

Harvard Youth Report

Univision

Telemundo

Split Ticket

Let Explain It to Me answer your biggest questions

The Explain It to Me podcast is a hotline for all your unanswered questions, and host Jonquilyn Hill is your friendly guide who will find you the answers you’re looking for – and maybe even the ones you don’t expect. Call us at 1-800-618-8545 or fill out this form and tell us what’s on your mind.

Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Would you live in an “adult dorm”? New research from a global architecture firm shows that cities like Denver, Seattle, and Minneapolis are great candidates for a housing model plan that would convert offices into co-living units. These lower-construction, affordable “micro-apartments” would feature shared kitchens and bathrooms.

To Próspera and beyond: In journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s latest book, she examines the growth of “charter cities” — special zones with their own laws, outside the control of the countries they’re based in. From Próspera in Honduras to former President Donald Trump’s pledge to build futuristic “freedom cities,” interest in this idea has grown in a world of closed borders.

The close race continues: With the election just under two weeks away, recent polling averages show that to win, presidential Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and former President Trump will need to breach the “blue wall” by winning one of three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. But until we get better swing-state data closer to Election Day, we won’t have a clear picture of who has an edge.

The Central Park Five sue Trump: On Monday, a federal lawsuit was filed against former President Donald Trump for “false and defamatory” statements he made during the September presidential debate about the infamous 1989 “Central Park Five” case. While the five Black and Latino teens accused of raping a woman in Central Park were exonerated by DNA evidence and a confession from the true perpetrator in 2002, over the years Trump has refused to apologize for calling for the execution of the men.

Harvey Weinstein’s declining health: Disgraced former film producer Harvey Weinstein has been diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. The 72-year-old is being treated in prison, where he is serving a 23-year sentence for rape and sexual assault and is currently waiting to be retried on those charges, after his sex crime conviction was overturned in appeals court in 2020 for procedural reasons.

Mental health professionals on strike: In California on Monday, 2,400 mental health professionals employed by Kaiser Permanente protested after management rejected proposals that were meant to slow employee turnover and improve care. The strike comes one year after the company agreed to a $200 million settlement concerning its handling of mental health care. [Los Angeles Times]

Furniture that just falls apart: Similar to fast fashion, the furniture industry is producing products that hardly last. While high-quality sofas and tables used to be the norm, mass-market production is making home fixtures cheaper and cheaper —  and heirloom furniture harder to come by. [Wall Street Journal]

Maskot /Getty Images

When I started reporting this story about whether Elon Musk’s plan to hold a lottery in return for registered voters’ signatures on a petition was legal, my first thought was, "This sounds a lot like vote-buying." 

It’s not exactly that, but it’s not totally dissimilar, either. Richard Hasen, one of the experts I spoke with, wrote an informative blog post about the problems with Musk’s scheme, which lays out clearly where the plan comes in conflict with US law. Of course, there’s no telling how courts will interpret Musk's plan or whether law enforcement will take action. 

I especially like that Hasen shows the difference between processes that make it easier for people to vote and actual enticements to vote or register, particularly because one can imagine bad-faith actors muddying that distinction. 

— Ellen Ioanes, news reporter

 Michael Swensen/Getty Images

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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