PrintNovember 4, 2024
A new kind of political advertising to beware of
This election cycle has launched a new kind of advertising that appears to be in the unregulated "wild west" realm of political campaign advertising: Text message ads asking for money or opinions, but always for money.
It offers all kinds of risks to those who read and respond to campaigns, and though it may be legit ... I doubt this. I'll get into why this is a problem shortly.
The text-to-raise-cash tack is part of the long evolution of political ads during campaigns over the years that have required regulation, and this new frontier needs regulation, too.
Here's how other kinds of regulation developed:
The first dramatic change in political advertising occurred in 1978, almost fifty years ago. To protect the electorate, ads had to end with a clear statement of who paid for the ad, and if it was the candidate, had to affirm that s/he approved of the ad.
A precursor was the 1972 presidential campaign, where Nixon's committee was named "The Committee to RE-Elect the President," known gleefully to the left-wing media as "CREEP." Never again, I swore to myself.
Six years later, I was working with my local conservative Republican Congressman, Floyd Spense, through his PAC. The FEC said we had to name the PAC, and attribute the ad to them. But to do that, I insisted, we had to rename the PAC from the prosaic "Committee to Re-Elect Floyd Spence" (not as bad as CREEP) but surely no prize.
I suggested we call our PAC "Ten Thousand Lexington County Homeowners Who Want To Return Floyd Spence to Congress." A bit bulky, but legit -- we had more than 10,000 local donors.
Now, think about how this sounded on radio or TV: "This message is paid for by Ten Thousand Lexington County Homeowners Who Want To Return Floyd Spence to Congress ..." followed by the Treasurer's name and title. The PAC name became part of the sales pitch, rather than just a clutter of words -- and Congressman Spence easily won re-election, creating a new trend in campaign ads.
Fast forward nearly 50 years to the 2024 election, and a new style of electioneering ads: the text message ads asking for money or opinions, but always for money.
Within weeks, the same messages were attributed to Donald Trump or Don Trump, Jr., Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and many other candidates or conservative pundits. And unless you believed in unvetted text massages, they all seemed to go to one website where money changed hands ... but who are they, really? No easy way to tell.
If you're serious about donating, all candidates or PACs or Congressional fund-raisers have websites. Those are established and easy to verify. But who can vouch for this new breed?
I'd thought, many times, about raising my concerns here, but I let it go, thinking this was a flash in the pan, until over this weekend, I realized three things.
First, if you reply STOP to end receiving any of these text messages, you almost immediately get the same message from the same "source" but using a different text phone number. They eagerly ignore any obvious way of resigning from the fund-raising appeal, which to me casts doubt about their legitimacy.
Second, I saw the motherlode of all fund-raising texts, supposedly coming from Marco Rubio, it asked for a large donation to be split up between nine conservative Senatorial candidates, including Nevada's own Sam Brown, a man worth supporting, but who has his own fund-raising site, plus to Sen. Rubio. "Senator Rubio" asked that donations be large enough to be meaningful to those Senatorial candidates, and to Senator Rubio himself. This "ask" was so bold it took my breath away.
Finally, third, I heard reports of Democrat plans to tie up the election results with litigation, justifying in my mind the expectation of a renewed flurry of increasingly intense funding appeals. Making this next blizzard of unregulated 'asks' to likely be mind-blowing.
I remain skeptical of this new and blatant fund-raising attempt. They could all be legit, but instead of blindly trusting your money to something almost impossible to verify, if you truly want to support a candidate, a cause or a PAC, visit their legal-and-regulated websites.
Ned Barnett is a long-time conservative campaign advisor in realms of media and strategy. He began his Presidential campaign work in the '76 Ford for President campaign in South Carolina, the first of three state-level campaigns.
Image: Pexels // Pexels License
A prolific author, writing coach and PR, Marketing and Advertising consultant, Ned plans a new book on winning political campaigns, scheduled for 2026. He can be reached at nedbarnett51@gmail.com, or 702-561-1167.
