At some point, in a bout of what turned out to be utter foolishness, I gave my cell phone number to ActBlue, which promptly resold it or shared it with every Democratic candidate from the candidate for the Billings, Montana dog-catcher race to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. I get at least one text every day asking for donations from various candidates (or, to put it another way, from whichever fundraising firm they’ve hired), and some days it’s more on the order of four or five.
I reflexively type “STOP” and send it off every time, and these do get acknowledged — that particular campaign won’t text me again. But it has no effect on the glut of other texts from other campaigns.
(I looked on the ActBlue site to see if there was an option to turn off the flood and other than deleting my account, there wasn’t — and deleting my account had no effect whatsoever on the volume.)
Until now, the texts have always been from moderate-to-liberal candidates. However, this weekend I got a text from the Nikki Haley campaign, formatted and styled just like all the texts from the Democrats.
I think it’s about to be time to change phone numbers. Imagine the hell I’d wind up in if the number finds its way next to Donald Trump.