My phone believes I am someone else. It has believed this for years, and no amount of pleading, cursing, or clicking “STOP” can change its mind. The person it thinks I am is a relative I’ll call John. John lives in California, votes as a Democrat, and has given a little money here and there to candidates he likes. I live in New York, have never made a political contribution in my life, and share none of his identifiers: not his name, not his phone number, not his bank account, not his address. You would think that would be enough to keep us separate. But the American political fundraising industry has found it surprisingly difficult to tell us apart. Over the past few years, my phone has become a dumping ground for messages that were never meant for me. Since March 2022, I have received 1,735 political texts from 812 different numbers. Almost none of them were addressed to anyone real with my name. I have replied “STOP” 49 times since 2021, along with a few desperate variations when the magic words changed. In November 2025, I begged Jon Ossoff’s campaign to leave me alone. It didn’t stop. I got thirteen more texts from nine different numbers after that. When the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told me that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were calling on me personally to act, I replied with two words that cannot be printed in a family newspaper. That didn’t work either. So this month, exhausted and twitchy, I finally decided to figure out what the hell was going on.
The first thing I learned was that the problem is not a matter of a few stray messages. It’s a flood. The texts come from every direction and often claim to be from famous people who are apparently desperate to get in touch with me. James Carville has “written” to me 27 times, soliciting money for at least a dozen different political organizations. Ken Burns has asked me to help elect Jacky Rosen, then Roy Cooper, then Sherrod Brown, as if I were a close friend of his. On April 2, 2025, the day after Cory Booker finished his marathon 25-hour Senate floor speech, I received the same first-person appeal from “Cory” three times in less than two hours, sent by three different fundraising operations. This is absurd on its face. But the real absurdity only becomes clear when you look at John’s actual donation record. Federal Election Commission records show that John has made roughly 160 contributions since 2017, totaling about $1,700. The median gift was $6. This year, he has given six times, for a total of $51. That is not a big fish. That is barely a minnow. Yet 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. The DCCC sent another 41 messages. John had given the DCCC $8 once, in 2020. House Majority PAC, which appears never to have received a dime from John, kept offering to multiply any contribution by as much as 900 percent. If these campaigns had simply looked at John’s profile, they would have seen a low-dollar donor who occasionally throws a few bucks at a Democrat. Instead, they treated him—and by extension me—like a high-value target worth harassing daily.
I started to trace the texts by following the links. Almost every message contained a link that, after several redirects, landed on ActBlue, the platform Democrats use to process donations. That was not surprising in itself. What was helpful is that many of those links carried tracking codes—strings of letters and numbers that identify which fundraising appeal was sent, which vendor sent it, and sometimes where the campaign got the recipient’s contact information. One October DCCC link contained a code that read: acq_sms.p2p_fr_2026.10.13_b1_dccc_rent_4mtch_st. If you squint, you can make out abbreviations for acquisition, peer-to-peer fundraising, and a rented list. But the word that appeared again and again across codes from completely unrelated campaigns was “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 uses that information to predict who might donate to a particular candidate. It appears to get a lot of its information from other data brokers, combining details about age, location, politics, and donation histories into voter profiles that campaigns can buy or rent. The particular kind of operation that seems to have caught me in its net is called peer-to-peer texting, where campaigns send mass texts that look personal but are actually automated. In this ecosystem, Sterling appears to be a major supplier. Of the 725 texts I received this year, nearly half had tracking codes that appeared to reference Sterling. They came from dozens of PACs and campaigns, including the DCCC, the DSCC, James Talarico, and Mark Kelly.
FEC records show that a Biden joint fundraising committee paid Sterling about $1.87 million for donor lists over four months beginning in November 2023. Around the same time, a text from the committee reached my phone with a code containing “strl2b.” The DSCC’s first reported payment to Sterling came on November 22, 2023—the very day I received one of its texts tagged “STL2.” According to FEC data, the committee has continued paying Sterling, including roughly $250,000 this summer, which preceded another wave of Sterling-tagged texts. Those recent texts all seemed to link back to a common platform. Even though dozens of campaigns had their own web addresses, 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 somewhere along the line, a Sterling database had mixed John’s donor profile with my phone number. When I finally reached Martin Kurucz, Sterling’s CEO, he was polite but blunt. “High-frequency solicitation is a necessary evil,” he told me. “Few people give, so every campaign chases the same donors, and texting at scale works too well to skip.” He declined to discuss Sterling’s proprietary data, but he 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. When I asked about the deluge I’d received, he said, “No contact database is perfect.” Even matches made with moderate confidence are generally accurate enough to be worth using, he said. Wrong numbers tend to drop out of circulation because the recipients don’t engage. He wouldn’t confirm that Sterling had caused the avalanche aimed at my phone, but he also didn’t deny it. Instead he offered a piece of advice: Don’t respond at all.
Maybe the most galling part is that I understand the logic of all this. These texts are cheap. The strategy isn’t all that different from how a lot of scams work—spray out messages and pray that someone will bite. You don’t need many people to respond for the operation to pay off. Campaigns know that most people will ignore them, delete them, or block the number. But a tiny fraction will be moved by a message supposedly from a beloved filmmaker or a senator who just spoke for 25 hours. Those few responses more than pay for the thousands of messages that land on the wrong phones. And because text messaging is still cheap and largely unregulated, there is almost no cost to getting it wrong. The people who are confused with donors, like me, are not the intended targets; we are just collateral damage. The real target is John, and John is not even a big donor. He has given $51 this year. The amount of money spent to text me 725 times asking for his money probably exceeds what John has ever donated. But the campaigns don’t care about the waste, because they are not paying for precision. They are paying for volume. The system is not designed to respect boundaries; it is designed to squeeze every last dollar out of a list of people who have shown even a hint of willingness to give. In that sense, the whole thing is a textbook example of how modern fundraising has become a numbers game, where human beings are reduced to data points and where “stop” means nothing because the next vendor, the next campaign, the next Super PAC has already bought the same name and is already dialing.
I looked for a way out. There are lawsuits, for example. At least two people have successfully gotten settlements out of Democratic organizations over apparently misdirected campaign texts, which presumably included never being contacted again. That seems like a lot of work, though, and I still don’t know exactly how my number got mixed up with John’s. Neither of those lawsuits established how the wrong names got attached to their numbers. The outcome for me remains the same: The DSCC now texts me more often than my mother does. I could hire a lawyer, but I’d rather not spend my life fighting an industry that has no incentive to care. I could keep replying “STOP” and “eat shit” and every other plea I can think of, but I know now that it won’t change anything. There are too many campaigns, too many vendors, too many lists, too many text blasts already scheduled for tomorrow. Somewhere out there, a data broker is selling my phone number again, because it looks like a person who might give six dollars to a Democrat. And somewhere in California, John is probably getting a knock on his door, or a mailer, or a phone call, while I get the texts meant to bring him to the polls. I’ll never meet him. He’ll never know about the thousand messages clogging my phone. But thanks to a quirk in a database, a tiny misunderstanding amplified by an entire industry, we are now permanently, absurdly tangled together. I’m not sure there’s a fix for that. I’m not sure the industry wants one. All I know is that my phone will keep buzzing, and somewhere a campaign will keep counting the responses, and the system will keep mistaking me for someone else until the money runs out or the sun burns cold. Probably the sun will burn cold first.
