Summary
My Journey to the Center of America’s Political Spam Text Hell I’ve gotten nearly 2,000 campaign fundraising texts that were meant for someone else. I tried to find out why—and uncovered a labyrinth of politicians, data brokers, and shady tactics. Video-Illustration: Sam Island Just as my kid is nodding off for the night, it arrives: a ding. It’s Nancy Pelosi, texting to tell me that if I don’t donate 1,700. The median gift was 51. In the same period, my phone received 725 fundraising texts literally begging for his money. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee alone sent 60 of them—22 in the first 20 days of October—from 28 different numbers. My relative had given it 8. House Majority PAC, which has never received a dime from John that I could find, kept offering to multiply contributions by as much as 900 percent. I understand the logic of these messages on some level. They are cheap, and the strategy isn’t all that different from how a lot of scams work—spray out messages and pray someone will bite. You don’t need many people to respond for it to pay off. What I couldn’t understand, though, was how I’d gotten wrapped up in all of this. I didn’t have to look far for the answer. Almost every text contained a link that, after a few redirects, led to ActBlue, the platform Democrats use to process donations. Helpfully, many of those links carried tracking codes—strings of letters and numbers identifying the fundraising appeal, the message being sent, and sometimes where the campaign got the recipient’s contact information. An October DCCC link, for instance, contained acq_sms.p2p_fr_2026.10.13_b1_dccc_rent_4mtch_st. Squint a little and you can make out abbreviations for acquisition (“acq”), peer-to-peer fundraising (“p2p_fr”), and a rented list (“dccc_rent”). But one word kept appearing in these strings across messages from otherwise unrelated campaigns: Sterling. Sterling Data Company is a relatively small firm that uses AI to help Democrats find people likely to give them money. In 2022, Forbes reported that Sterling had assembled a database of roughly 30 million political donors, with hundreds of details about some of them, including what cars they drove and what they watched on Netflix. Sterling says it uses that information to predict who might donate to a particular candidate. Sterling appears to get much of its information from other data brokers, combining details about people’s age, location, politics, and donation histories into voter profiles that campaigns can buy or rent. Of the 725 texts I’d received this year, nearly half contained tracking codes that appeared to reference Sterling. They came from dozens of PACs and campaigns, including the DCCC, DSCC, James Talarico, and Mark Kelly. FEC records show that a Biden joint fundraising committee paid Sterling about 250,000 this summer, which preceded another wave of Sterling-tagged texts. Those recent texts all appeared to link back to a common platform. Dozens of campaigns had their own web addresses, but I could see that they used nearly identical software and tracking codes, often ending in tier1. Sterling’s own website advertises something it calls “Tier 1 contact data intelligence,” though I couldn’t establish whether the two were connected or who ran the system. Still, the breadcrumbs were leading me to suspect that, at some point, a Sterling database mixup had lumped John together with my phone number. “High-frequency solicitation is a necessary evil,” Martin Kurucz, Sterling’s CEO, tells me when I ask about all of this. “Few people give, so every campaign chases the same donors, and texting at scale works too well to skip.” Kurucz declined to discuss Sterling’s proprietary data but confirmed that the company handles the texting itself and can rent the same record to multiple campaigns. Sterling limits how often individuals can be contacted, he said, though he didn’t specify what those limits are. “No contact database is perfect,” Kurucz says. Even matches made with moderate confidence are generally accurate enough to be worth using, he says. Wrong numbers tend to drop out of circulation because the recipients don’t engage. Kurucz wouldn’t confirm that Sterling has caused the deluge of misdirected text messages my way, but he also didn’t deny it. Instead he offered some advice for making them stop: Don’t respond at all. I found that there’s another way out: lawsuits. At least two people have successfully gotten a settlement out of Democratic organizations over apparently misdirected campaign texts, which presumably included never being contacted again. That seems like a lot of work, though. Meanwhile neither of those lawsuits established how the wrong names got attached to their numbers. I still don’t know for sure how mine got mixed up with John’s. But the outcome is the same: The DSCC now texts me more often than my mother. Replying “eat shit” another hundred times won’t change that.