Every election season, millions of Americans receive text messages from political campaigns, parties, PACs, and advocacy groups they have never heard of. Most never requested them. Most never gave permission. In 2022 alone, Americans received roughly 15 billion political text messages — a 158% increase over the prior cycle. The 2024 election was projected to exceed 25 billion.
Yet the messages keep coming. Which raises a simple question: why are the people who write the spam laws allowed to benefit from a system that permits political organizations to flood citizens with unwanted messages?
How the exemptions work
Political organizations are explicitly exempt from the National Do Not Call Registry. The FTC's rules simply do not apply to them. A business that ignored the Do Not Call list would face enforcement action. A campaign faces nothing.
Text messages follow a similar pattern. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act technically requires prior consent before sending automated texts to a mobile phone — but political campaigns found a workaround. Platforms that require a human operator to manually click to send each message don't qualify as automatic dialers under the law. The FCC confirmed this interpretation in 2020. No automatic dialer, no consent requirement. A campaign can pull your number from a public voter roll and start texting you without ever asking.
Lawyers debate the details. Citizens experience the outcome: their phone buzzes, and someone they never contacted is asking for money. That should not be normal.
This is not a free speech issue
Political campaigns, parties, and advocacy groups should absolutely be free to speak. That is not in dispute. A campaign has every right to buy a billboard, run television ads, build a website, hold rallies, and send physical mail. Freedom of speech is not the issue.
The issue is access. Freedom of speech is not the same as a right to reach into someone's pocket. Your phone is a private communication channel, and access to it should require your consent. Currently, political organizations enjoy special treatment that businesses don't — the result of a mix of statutory exemptions, constitutional protections, and regulatory interpretations that add up to one set of rules for campaigns and another for everyone else. That is backwards. The people who write the rules should be the first people required to follow them.
One standard
The solution is straightforward: one consent requirement, applied equally to everyone. No special treatment for businesses, campaigns, parties, PACs, or advocacy groups. If an organization wants access to a citizen's phone, it should first obtain that citizen's permission.
This principle is not partisan. It applies equally to Republicans and Democrats, to every candidate and every cause. The sender does not matter. The citizen does.
A place to start
No legislation called the Citizen Communication Consent Act currently exists in Congress. That is part of the problem. The FCC's own guidance acknowledges the gap plainly: political campaigns are held to different standards than commercial organizations. Even the industry's own P2P Alliance has grappled publicly with whether opt-in consent should be required for political texting. Consumer advocates have called on the FCC directly to close the loophole and treat political texts like any other unsolicited message. So far, Congress hasn't acted.
That's what such a law would need to fix: a single consent standard for all organizations seeking to initiate recurring direct electronic communications — campaigns, parties, PACs, nonprofits, and businesses alike. Consent would be clear, voluntary, and immediately revocable. Public communication would remain completely unrestricted. The law would not govern what anyone says — only whether they have permission to say it directly to your phone.
Political organizations should be free to speak. They should not be free to reach into your pocket without asking.