As you read this we are fast approaching election day. Whether you voted by mail, early in person, or are waiting for the big day, the season for insults, boasts, promises, falsehoods, hyperbole, truth, claims, attacks and every other form of free speech is drawing to a close. Nah, just kidding! It won't stop, but it will diminish. As of November 4th, or shortly thereafter as they call the winners in most races, we'll revert to the usual state of affairs, which, sadly, is insults, boasts, promises, falsehoods, hyperbole, truth, claims, attacks and every other form of free speech. But with one side no longer actively seeking office it should drop to about half of what we've seen and heard over the last few months.
To be fair, none of this is new, though the method of electioneering has changed over time. In the past the options were a soapbox or bigger box, but it all amounted to gathering a group of people and standing in front of them to tell them all the good you were going to do and all the bad your opponent would inflict on them. It was the presidential election of 1920 that changed the playing field. Even though only 100 people were listening, Pittsburgh's KDKA became the first station to broadcast the results of that year's presidential election. Four years later the airwaves were filled, not just with results but with ads for the candidates. As TV was introduced and spread the evolution continued, with 1952 marking the first time that presidential candidates turned to television to communicate their message.
From the beginning, all those live candidate pronouncements were supplemented by handbills, pamphlets and posters. Trying to broaden their reach, candidates turned from in-person distribution to the US Mail. That meant that as election day drew closer your mailbox became filled with cards and flyers with smiling pictures of the sender and snarling visages of their opponent. Technology overtook that as well, and by 1980 your electronic inbox was flooded with digital versions of the same.
As much of our everyday electronic communication has moved from email to messaging, the pols have made the switch as well. As such this year marks a major escalation in using text as a campaign tool. While there is no accurate measure of the volume, experts guesstimate that tens of billions of texts were sent out this election season. This is spite of the realization that they don't necessarily make a big difference. According to Katherine Haenschen, assistant professor in Northeastern University's Departments of Communication Studies and Political Science, "Text messages are effective, but we're finding that the effects are relatively small." Per her study as published in the journal "Political Behavior," messages increased turnout by 0.25 percentage points during the 2018 U.S. midterms. That's an additional 2.5 voters per 1,000 people.
But especially in a close election every vote counts, and election texts are cheap to deploy. Average costs range from 3 cents to 8 cents a message, so a campaign sending 500,000 messages at 7 cents spends $35,000. This cycle the top sender is Democratic Senator John Ossoff who is running for reelection in Georgia. His campaign has so far spent about $10.6 million in messaging, which works out to about 151,428,571 texts. Add in various PACs, double it to account for roughly the same from his opposition, and no wonder every voter's phone in Georgia is overheating.
Even without a competitive race in New York, my Pixel is no more immune. It seems that not an hour goes by that I don't get another text message from Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania or John Turek in Iowa, Troy Jackson in Maine and yes, Senator Ossoff in Georgia. I can't vote in any of those races, but my money is good anywhere. And so they and their affiliates ping me and ping me, hoping that I will finally relent and send them some cash.
As a matter of course I have taken to reporting every message I get as spam and blocking that number regardless of the sender's political outlook. But doing the math shows I'm on the losing end of this battle. Since phone numbers in the US consist of 10 digits, that means the maximum number of possible senders is one shy of 10 billion. In just the last few weeks I've blacklisted 343. At that rate I've got a ways to go.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford is looking forward to the election being over. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
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