I am SOOOOO with you on this. The endless email and texts are not just annoying, they’re insulting: They are an insult to the intelligence. They are an assault on the intelligence. They are stupid. I hate them. And, further, these endless and completely dishonest appeals are an embarrassment to the Democratic brand and constantly undermine the integrity of our party and candidates. Make them stop!!! 🤯
I'm going to be honest in this venue rather than hiding my opinion--I wasn't surprised that this worked on Trump voters (all of whom are mouthbreathing rubes, of course). I *was* surprised that this technique was remotely effective on all of us high-minded, wise, sensible Democratic donors.
(tongue in cheek, but only halfway)
Christ, it is the most annoying thing on the planet. I will NOT GIVE A FUCKING DIME to any of this inane stuff. Nawt one dime, as Jim Calhoun would say.
The thing is you can measure the people that respond to these emails but you can’t measure the people that you’ve completely pushed out of the donor pool. The fact that donating to a campaign marks you as a sucker is why I now abstain. And I have a lot more disposable income now than I did in my 20s, so Dems have lost out on a lot of possible money this way.
Wanted to make exactly this same point. You can measure marginal propensity to donate but not marginal disincentive to enter what is fundamentally a lemon market in which other rubes’ willingness to respond to these asinine emails makes the experience subjectively worse for those who don’t.
There’s a certain level of “study finds that those willing to attend con artists’ convention are susceptible to being conned, recommends that con artists continue to prominently advertise the nature of their convention to all and sundry and continue to con attendees” at work here.
Given that Biden seems to be somewhat dependent on older voters' relatively high approval of him...it kind of makes sense.
The 50+ (60+?) crowd seems to be the most susceptible* to this kind of stuff. Presumably because they didn't develop resistance/immunity to it when they were younger and more mentally adaptable.
*Yes yes, obviously this doesn't apply to all the olds. Just most.
It’s not surprising when you see Democratic voters (Matt included, sometimes) constantly doomering on Twitter. Educated Democrats are just as capable of being dumb.
You didn’t mention another form of deception that’s harder to regulate - the citing of sketchy or outdated polling.
In 2020, Amy McGrath spent 90MM dollars to lose to Mitch McConnell by a half million votes in Kentucky.
I received countless emails citing McGrath as only down 1pt to McConnell. That was one single outlier poll was from July but McGrath’s campaign and PACs were still citing it in emails in October when she was down 4pts.
McGrath had no chance of beating McConnell and it’s a crime that kind of money was spent on her campaign that could have gone to other races.
There isn’t much legally that could be done to regulate this kind of claim but it really made me realize the complete lack of integrity the fundraising organizations have.
In your opinion and experience, is some of this a lack of co-ordination between National Committees, Senatorial Campaign Committees, and the individual campaigns?
It doesn’t really benefit the Democrats overall for millions of dollars to be flushed down the drain for campaigns like McGraths or Jaime Harrison’s.
For Joe Biden’s campaign to send out texts like “we need you now to hit this (made up) fundraising goal” makes a rational sort of sense. Every dollar helps in a winnable campaign.
For a campaign that’s hit its ceiling, those dollars raised would be better spent in other states or districts. Or just in the pockets of the donors vs those of campaign political consultants.
Step 1 before I plow into the meat of this take: always use a junk email for signing up for anything. Let them spam you into the void, while you're blissfully unaware of it all.
It always surprises me when people say this tactic works, because it has never, ever worked for me on anything. I cannot remember a time I’ve sent money or bought any product in response to an email or text message.
Another annoying thing is there is no attempt to build a relationship, it’s all transactional. Around the primary, for example, I got ton of text messages. Before that and since then, nothing. I can tell when campaigns think or want me to be their occasional side piece.
There are a couple of local politicians who send out a fairly regular (monthly?) newsletter to my email. I get these from my mayor, my city council person, a few other city council people, my state senator. I probably delete 75% of them in my mad rush to delete the other 100+ spam emails that fill my inbox each day but I do skim about 25% from them and they are usually quite good. Nice combo of feel good news, information about ongoing attempts to address real problems, and frequently a call to participate in some sort of volunteer opportunity or attend some community event. Those do make me feel more loyal to the folks who I have donated to or voted for in the past. The ones from my mayor, who I did not vote for, have given me a better impression of him and made it more likely that I would vote for him next time. (Note the last mayor's newsletters did not have that effect as it generally just continued to reenforce my views of her policies as being bad.) These are from elected folks so they don't contain a link to a campaign donation but I am more likely to donate when the election comes.
I feel like if the DNC send something like that each month or even twice a month that highlighted policy wins, issues the party is trying to focus on in the coming months, and good news about policy wins etc for a few folks around the country at different levels, it would make me much more likely to donate than these crazed emails and texts do.
Want to echo this, most of my political involvement is local, there are oftentimes weekly emails from local electeds that are written by a normal person with information about what’s going on in the community, what they’ve been working on this week, volunteer and job opportunities etc. oftentimes there’s a donation link at the bottom but it’s a much healthier way to connect with supporters. Probably not as effective at getting money in the short term but much more effective at building real loyalty and trust
We have an autopay monthly donation to local shelter to scratch that itch - plus our four shelter adopted animals. We both agree that we cannot actually go to a shelter anymore because the urge to bring home another would be very strong. It’s definitely a weakness here too!
YouTube seems to know somehow too and feeds me that content. It’s actually kind of scary how this weird crossover knowledge about personal interests seems to happen.
I’m going to hard disagree with this entire take. Neither political party can be trusted to self-regulate, and they certainly won’t voluntarily hold themselves to standards that are comparable. They do this stuff because it works!
We need a constitutional right to privacy. An implication would be that no business can share (ie sell) collected contact information, and no business can cold call, text, or email without explicit opt-in.
Targeted spam and advertising are the root cause of polarization, they are the vector of endless scams and fraud, and these things bring no benefit that is worth the cost to society.
I agree! But these emails are subject to first amendment protections. That's why reform should first come from within. And as someone who has some experience in this business, I can tell you that there's a lot of people working in it who are uncomfortable with spammy email programs. There just needs to be some more pressure for the industry to reform, and that is what this article is trying to do... get a conversation going!
The first amendment doesn't protect the right of one entity to sell the contact information of another entity. I don't think we have a path to require that people only send "reasonable emails," but I do think we have grounds to require consent for the collection and sharing/selling of personal contact information.
(PS: Sorry if I sound cranky at you, Ben! I appreciate that you're putting ideas out there and think they're interesting, even though I disagree with this particular take :))
Does the first amendment really cover screaming nonstop in someone's face? In front of their house? Inside their house? I ask only somewhat facetiously.
What if there were a federally recognized private tort against entities sending unsolicited emails, creating inhibitory, but private, liability for so doing? Not sure if that’s 1AM-compatible.
Strongly agree that we need a constitutional right to privacy. In fact, out of all the possible amendments to the Constitution that I might personally support, an amendment adding a new right to privacy is at the top of the list of the ones that might actually be feasible enough to be worth the effort of trying to get it going.
As long as it's not drafted in an overreacting or partisan one-sided way, and both authorizes and leaves enough room for legislation filling in specific details and updating them as circumstances change, I think support for an amendment like that could cut across party lines and achieve consensus support.
I agree with this. I’m also skeptical that Ben’s proposed solution would make me hate these emails less—I don’t hate them because of the spammy tone, I hate them because they are unsolicited and they clog up my inbox. Getting unsolicited emails about policy wouldn’t make me any happier.
I think the Democratic party also doesn't recognize that solicitations for money are the only communications most people get from office holders and seekers. And while "We're about to miss our goal!" and "Things are getting desperate!" may be good for drumming up money from 2% of recipients, you're sending the other 98% regular updates on how much you're failing - who wants to support a party that always one $20 monthly donation away from collapsing?
(While I'm a guaranteed STOP response to any text and an unsubscribe from any e-mail, for months I was getting Twitter ads (I miss Tweetbot) from Ruben Gallego that always said he was losing to Keri Lake 48% to 45%. My God man, if you're losing to that nut bar after Sinema dropped out, why am I going to waste my time and money supporting you? It turns out polling is light and he's up in the recent ones, so why are you tweeting out a message of incompetence?)
"I think the Democratic party also doesn't recognize that solicitations for money are the only communications most people get from office holders and seekers. And while "We're about to miss our goal!" and "Things are getting desperate!" may be good for drumming up money from 2% of recipients, you're sending the other 98% regular updates on how much you're failing - who wants to support a party that always one $20 monthly donation away from collapsing?
(While I'm a guaranteed STOP response to any text and an unsubscribe from any e-mail, for months I was getting Twitter ads (I miss Tweetbot) from Ruben Gallego that always said he was losing to Keri Lake 48% to 45%. My God man, if you're losing to that nut bar after Sinema dropped out, why am I going to waste my time and money supporting you? It turns out polling is light and he's up in the recent ones, so why are you tweeting out a message of incompetence?)"
Well it is all annoying as fuck. And it may be a heavy contributor to doomerism among Democratic base groups, and even the mainstream journalistic class, many of whom might have donated to campaigns and be recipients of this stuff.
......But, but, but....Maybe it's still been working. This style has been out there consistently since at least 2018 and before, and Democrats have over performed polling consistently since 2022 in off-year elections and special.
Maybe its a masochistic pain in the ass, but it works.
I have to be honest with the iPhone people. I have a pixel, and every political text has been automatically sent to spam, for years, with no effort on my part. Give it a try, or maybe apple will copy it on a few more years 🫠😜😉
same here. My email/sms spam folders are filled with political donation requests. The only reason I wouldn't buy this take is that Google does an A+ job of filtering them out for me.
Just so you know, Ben, the Facebook v. Duguid link doesn't work. You copy and pasted the text "Facebook v. Duguid" in the link field instead of the actual link that you wanted to cite.
"The emails and texts you receive have First Amendment political speech protections, making them harder to regulate than commercial advertising."
So, a couple points on this. First, commercial advertising also has extensive First Amendment rights too. They are officially lower than standard speech, but in practice it's hardly not by much at all. The Central Husdon test [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hudson_Gas_%26_Electric_Corp._v._Public_Service_Commission] lays this out. Second, I am curious if political fundraising specifically (not general politicking) would qualify as commercial speech because it's asking for a financial transaction. I haven't been able to find case law on this one yet though, so if someone else does please do post.
As for Facebook v. Duguid, that was a statutory interpretation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991. That law established the Do Not Call Registry, and that was upheld as constitution because people could opt in to not being bombarded with unsolicited speech they did not want to hear. That law is of course out of date with all the technological advances since then, as Facebook v. Duguid demonstrated. It also exempts political organizations, something that I actually have parallel First Amendment concerns about that I'll leave for another day. However, I think if Congress would be able to write an upgraded TCPA for other forms of communication that was completely content neutral in nature (meaning you can't pick on political fundraising or anything else specifically), I think there's a decent chance that could fly under the First Amendment.
How about charging $0.0001 cents per text? That wouldn’t influence ordinary people’s texting but would eliminate a lot of the spam ones. But Ghost of Tariq Aziz has the solution above - implement a real do not call registry. But neither party wants that….
Thanks for the info. I'll amend my proposal to a higher fee for mass texts (say to more than 20 people at a time). Something needs to be done to reduce the nuisance - these things are relentless.
I assume that is a reasonable guess at the marginal cost of a single SMS address billed to the organization that contracts for the mass text blast? Interesting. Higher than I would have expected, and enough that it should be a meaningful fraction of total fundraising/engagement cost, even with an unrealistically high response rate (which I assume is tracked). Still a trivial fraction of the societal cost.
Google has had the political text problem solved for years. It marks political texts as spam and hides them away in a folder you never have to see. I expect apple will "discover" this amazing feature in a year or so and all the fruit brained people will act like they just cured cancer.
If you mark emails as spam and unsubscribe it significantly affects the sender's reputation and how likely future mail from them will be automatically marked as spam for other people (conversely marking as not spam is good for them)
I am SOOOOO with you on this. The endless email and texts are not just annoying, they’re insulting: They are an insult to the intelligence. They are an assault on the intelligence. They are stupid. I hate them. And, further, these endless and completely dishonest appeals are an embarrassment to the Democratic brand and constantly undermine the integrity of our party and candidates. Make them stop!!! 🤯
Agreed!
@Ben, this is your best take yet in your short tenure.
I'm going to be honest in this venue rather than hiding my opinion--I wasn't surprised that this worked on Trump voters (all of whom are mouthbreathing rubes, of course). I *was* surprised that this technique was remotely effective on all of us high-minded, wise, sensible Democratic donors.
(tongue in cheek, but only halfway)
Christ, it is the most annoying thing on the planet. I will NOT GIVE A FUCKING DIME to any of this inane stuff. Nawt one dime, as Jim Calhoun would say.
I will eat this take from the take bakery.
The thing is you can measure the people that respond to these emails but you can’t measure the people that you’ve completely pushed out of the donor pool. The fact that donating to a campaign marks you as a sucker is why I now abstain. And I have a lot more disposable income now than I did in my 20s, so Dems have lost out on a lot of possible money this way.
Wanted to make exactly this same point. You can measure marginal propensity to donate but not marginal disincentive to enter what is fundamentally a lemon market in which other rubes’ willingness to respond to these asinine emails makes the experience subjectively worse for those who don’t.
There’s a certain level of “study finds that those willing to attend con artists’ convention are susceptible to being conned, recommends that con artists continue to prominently advertise the nature of their convention to all and sundry and continue to con attendees” at work here.
Tbh you can track unsubscribes from the emails and such.
Most smarter people are Democrats, but most Democrats are still pretty dumb.
Given that Biden seems to be somewhat dependent on older voters' relatively high approval of him...it kind of makes sense.
The 50+ (60+?) crowd seems to be the most susceptible* to this kind of stuff. Presumably because they didn't develop resistance/immunity to it when they were younger and more mentally adaptable.
*Yes yes, obviously this doesn't apply to all the olds. Just most.
It’s not surprising when you see Democratic voters (Matt included, sometimes) constantly doomering on Twitter. Educated Democrats are just as capable of being dumb.
The only thing that's surprising is that anybody is on Twitter. Goddamn brain spiders.
Will the parties abide by ethical business practices? Let's ask Republican National Committee Chair *checks notes* Lara Trump.
You didn’t mention another form of deception that’s harder to regulate - the citing of sketchy or outdated polling.
In 2020, Amy McGrath spent 90MM dollars to lose to Mitch McConnell by a half million votes in Kentucky.
I received countless emails citing McGrath as only down 1pt to McConnell. That was one single outlier poll was from July but McGrath’s campaign and PACs were still citing it in emails in October when she was down 4pts.
McGrath had no chance of beating McConnell and it’s a crime that kind of money was spent on her campaign that could have gone to other races.
There isn’t much legally that could be done to regulate this kind of claim but it really made me realize the complete lack of integrity the fundraising organizations have.
That is so true, and I’d lump that in the deceptive fundraising tactic bucket. But thanks for the additional mention!
In your opinion and experience, is some of this a lack of co-ordination between National Committees, Senatorial Campaign Committees, and the individual campaigns?
It doesn’t really benefit the Democrats overall for millions of dollars to be flushed down the drain for campaigns like McGraths or Jaime Harrison’s.
For Joe Biden’s campaign to send out texts like “we need you now to hit this (made up) fundraising goal” makes a rational sort of sense. Every dollar helps in a winnable campaign.
For a campaign that’s hit its ceiling, those dollars raised would be better spent in other states or districts. Or just in the pockets of the donors vs those of campaign political consultants.
I am so used to deleting emails with this kind of subject line that I almost deleted this one.
Lol that was my worry.
If you use gmail unsubscribe and mark as spam, it's much more effective than just deleting since it affects the sender's reputation
Step 1 before I plow into the meat of this take: always use a junk email for signing up for anything. Let them spam you into the void, while you're blissfully unaware of it all.
It always surprises me when people say this tactic works, because it has never, ever worked for me on anything. I cannot remember a time I’ve sent money or bought any product in response to an email or text message.
Another annoying thing is there is no attempt to build a relationship, it’s all transactional. Around the primary, for example, I got ton of text messages. Before that and since then, nothing. I can tell when campaigns think or want me to be their occasional side piece.
The median Slow Borer strikes me as more impervious to this spam as the median person.
There are a couple of local politicians who send out a fairly regular (monthly?) newsletter to my email. I get these from my mayor, my city council person, a few other city council people, my state senator. I probably delete 75% of them in my mad rush to delete the other 100+ spam emails that fill my inbox each day but I do skim about 25% from them and they are usually quite good. Nice combo of feel good news, information about ongoing attempts to address real problems, and frequently a call to participate in some sort of volunteer opportunity or attend some community event. Those do make me feel more loyal to the folks who I have donated to or voted for in the past. The ones from my mayor, who I did not vote for, have given me a better impression of him and made it more likely that I would vote for him next time. (Note the last mayor's newsletters did not have that effect as it generally just continued to reenforce my views of her policies as being bad.) These are from elected folks so they don't contain a link to a campaign donation but I am more likely to donate when the election comes.
I feel like if the DNC send something like that each month or even twice a month that highlighted policy wins, issues the party is trying to focus on in the coming months, and good news about policy wins etc for a few folks around the country at different levels, it would make me much more likely to donate than these crazed emails and texts do.
Want to echo this, most of my political involvement is local, there are oftentimes weekly emails from local electeds that are written by a normal person with information about what’s going on in the community, what they’ve been working on this week, volunteer and job opportunities etc. oftentimes there’s a donation link at the bottom but it’s a much healthier way to connect with supporters. Probably not as effective at getting money in the short term but much more effective at building real loyalty and trust
That’s nice, I don’t get anything like that.
Notable exception to this: the dang Humane Society.
A sad kitten snares me for twenty bucks, every time.
We have an autopay monthly donation to local shelter to scratch that itch - plus our four shelter adopted animals. We both agree that we cannot actually go to a shelter anymore because the urge to bring home another would be very strong. It’s definitely a weakness here too!
YouTube seems to know somehow too and feeds me that content. It’s actually kind of scary how this weird crossover knowledge about personal interests seems to happen.
I’m going to hard disagree with this entire take. Neither political party can be trusted to self-regulate, and they certainly won’t voluntarily hold themselves to standards that are comparable. They do this stuff because it works!
We need a constitutional right to privacy. An implication would be that no business can share (ie sell) collected contact information, and no business can cold call, text, or email without explicit opt-in.
Targeted spam and advertising are the root cause of polarization, they are the vector of endless scams and fraud, and these things bring no benefit that is worth the cost to society.
I agree! But these emails are subject to first amendment protections. That's why reform should first come from within. And as someone who has some experience in this business, I can tell you that there's a lot of people working in it who are uncomfortable with spammy email programs. There just needs to be some more pressure for the industry to reform, and that is what this article is trying to do... get a conversation going!
The first amendment doesn't protect the right of one entity to sell the contact information of another entity. I don't think we have a path to require that people only send "reasonable emails," but I do think we have grounds to require consent for the collection and sharing/selling of personal contact information.
(PS: Sorry if I sound cranky at you, Ben! I appreciate that you're putting ideas out there and think they're interesting, even though I disagree with this particular take :))
If that’s the case, why are there rules like CAN-SPAMM that prevent private parties from sharing emails without your consent?
Does the first amendment really cover screaming nonstop in someone's face? In front of their house? Inside their house? I ask only somewhat facetiously.
What if there were a federally recognized private tort against entities sending unsolicited emails, creating inhibitory, but private, liability for so doing? Not sure if that’s 1AM-compatible.
Wouldn't a "do not text" feature be constitutional?
Strongly agree that we need a constitutional right to privacy. In fact, out of all the possible amendments to the Constitution that I might personally support, an amendment adding a new right to privacy is at the top of the list of the ones that might actually be feasible enough to be worth the effort of trying to get it going.
As long as it's not drafted in an overreacting or partisan one-sided way, and both authorizes and leaves enough room for legislation filling in specific details and updating them as circumstances change, I think support for an amendment like that could cut across party lines and achieve consensus support.
I agree with this. I’m also skeptical that Ben’s proposed solution would make me hate these emails less—I don’t hate them because of the spammy tone, I hate them because they are unsolicited and they clog up my inbox. Getting unsolicited emails about policy wouldn’t make me any happier.
If there were a LOT LESS of them and I could actually opt out I would hate them significantly less.
I just don’t think opting out makes a meaningful difference as long as they can sell your info to other campaigns.
I think the Democratic party also doesn't recognize that solicitations for money are the only communications most people get from office holders and seekers. And while "We're about to miss our goal!" and "Things are getting desperate!" may be good for drumming up money from 2% of recipients, you're sending the other 98% regular updates on how much you're failing - who wants to support a party that always one $20 monthly donation away from collapsing?
(While I'm a guaranteed STOP response to any text and an unsubscribe from any e-mail, for months I was getting Twitter ads (I miss Tweetbot) from Ruben Gallego that always said he was losing to Keri Lake 48% to 45%. My God man, if you're losing to that nut bar after Sinema dropped out, why am I going to waste my time and money supporting you? It turns out polling is light and he's up in the recent ones, so why are you tweeting out a message of incompetence?)
"I think the Democratic party also doesn't recognize that solicitations for money are the only communications most people get from office holders and seekers. And while "We're about to miss our goal!" and "Things are getting desperate!" may be good for drumming up money from 2% of recipients, you're sending the other 98% regular updates on how much you're failing - who wants to support a party that always one $20 monthly donation away from collapsing?
(While I'm a guaranteed STOP response to any text and an unsubscribe from any e-mail, for months I was getting Twitter ads (I miss Tweetbot) from Ruben Gallego that always said he was losing to Keri Lake 48% to 45%. My God man, if you're losing to that nut bar after Sinema dropped out, why am I going to waste my time and money supporting you? It turns out polling is light and he's up in the recent ones, so why are you tweeting out a message of incompetence?)"
Well it is all annoying as fuck. And it may be a heavy contributor to doomerism among Democratic base groups, and even the mainstream journalistic class, many of whom might have donated to campaigns and be recipients of this stuff.
......But, but, but....Maybe it's still been working. This style has been out there consistently since at least 2018 and before, and Democrats have over performed polling consistently since 2022 in off-year elections and special.
Maybe its a masochistic pain in the ass, but it works.
I have to be honest with the iPhone people. I have a pixel, and every political text has been automatically sent to spam, for years, with no effort on my part. Give it a try, or maybe apple will copy it on a few more years 🫠😜😉
same here. My email/sms spam folders are filled with political donation requests. The only reason I wouldn't buy this take is that Google does an A+ job of filtering them out for me.
Even better, you could implement an opt in do not call registry and honor it.
Just so you know, Ben, the Facebook v. Duguid link doesn't work. You copy and pasted the text "Facebook v. Duguid" in the link field instead of the actual link that you wanted to cite.
If your a legal nerd, Alito's concurrence about the limits of all those canons of construction judges love to invoke is good.
Thanks. And I figured you'd have something good to add.
"The emails and texts you receive have First Amendment political speech protections, making them harder to regulate than commercial advertising."
So, a couple points on this. First, commercial advertising also has extensive First Amendment rights too. They are officially lower than standard speech, but in practice it's hardly not by much at all. The Central Husdon test [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hudson_Gas_%26_Electric_Corp._v._Public_Service_Commission] lays this out. Second, I am curious if political fundraising specifically (not general politicking) would qualify as commercial speech because it's asking for a financial transaction. I haven't been able to find case law on this one yet though, so if someone else does please do post.
As for Facebook v. Duguid, that was a statutory interpretation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991. That law established the Do Not Call Registry, and that was upheld as constitution because people could opt in to not being bombarded with unsolicited speech they did not want to hear. That law is of course out of date with all the technological advances since then, as Facebook v. Duguid demonstrated. It also exempts political organizations, something that I actually have parallel First Amendment concerns about that I'll leave for another day. However, I think if Congress would be able to write an upgraded TCPA for other forms of communication that was completely content neutral in nature (meaning you can't pick on political fundraising or anything else specifically), I think there's a decent chance that could fly under the First Amendment.
How about charging $0.0001 cents per text? That wouldn’t influence ordinary people’s texting but would eliminate a lot of the spam ones. But Ghost of Tariq Aziz has the solution above - implement a real do not call registry. But neither party wants that….
That’s already how much it costs to send one email. SMS actually costs a bit more to send, around $0.007 per message.
Thanks for the info. I'll amend my proposal to a higher fee for mass texts (say to more than 20 people at a time). Something needs to be done to reduce the nuisance - these things are relentless.
I assume that is a reasonable guess at the marginal cost of a single SMS address billed to the organization that contracts for the mass text blast? Interesting. Higher than I would have expected, and enough that it should be a meaningful fraction of total fundraising/engagement cost, even with an unrealistically high response rate (which I assume is tracked). Still a trivial fraction of the societal cost.
Google has had the political text problem solved for years. It marks political texts as spam and hides them away in a folder you never have to see. I expect apple will "discover" this amazing feature in a year or so and all the fruit brained people will act like they just cured cancer.
If you mark emails as spam and unsubscribe it significantly affects the sender's reputation and how likely future mail from them will be automatically marked as spam for other people (conversely marking as not spam is good for them)
If you have the right phone (a pixel) essentially all political texts get spam blocked.
That would be a reason to switch but I am so hopelessly enmeshed in Apple product sphere that I fear I can never get out.