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I have learned this through brutal experience.
Never, ever give out your cell phone number. Never.
Was it Townhall.com? Because that happened to me with Townhall.com. Signed up years and years ago, and the daily list of emails is still growing.
Thing is… I don’t think I did give a phone number… just my email to sign up. Which makes all the $exts feel even more like creepy intrusions on my privacy.
The quality of political marketing by Republicans and conservative groups in general strikes me as very, very low.
I get dozens of paper-mail pieces with envelopes that say things like “CONFIDENTIAL”…”It is a Federal crime to interfere with this document”…”Serial Number 4325424325345.”
Perhaps every profession and industry bears the stamp of its formative years, and I suspect that a lot of direct-mail marketing people (including e-mail and text marketing) subconsciously think of their targets as naive and ignorant hicks:
“Lurlene! We got some mail from the big city…and it has a lot of BIG NUMBERS on it”…must be really important!”
Gee, I woulda thought all those urgent pleas for money would’ve made you feel loved and wanted.
I’ll stay mum on this.
I know other people who subscribed to the same outlet I did who haven’t got zonked nearly so hard, and though I can’t think of any reason other than my subscription for the $exts to start suddenly pouring in like they did, I don’t want to pretend this is that outlet’s normal subscriber experience if it isn’t. What’s important is my confidence that Ricochet doesn’t do this.
I never get $exts, only emails, and I know who did it. Fortunately, I maintain more than one email address to keep these people from annoying me.
Sure, I get them, too. Sometimes they make me laugh. I just hit the “delete” button and move on. It’s especially funny when they call me by my first name, and try to sound like my friend. I understand marketing, and this is marketing on steroids. Every once in a while, I donate a little bit, but never anything significant. It does warm the cockles of my heart to hear that the R’s are way out-raising the Rats.
Gee I thought for a moment you were talking sexting. On Ricochet that might be more than I could handle.
Hmm, it turns out that there are a lot of different Trump wrapping papers for sale. Curiously, no Trump rolling papers.
Missed opportunity, there.
One more example of how $exting could use more imaginative $wag, if it has to happen at all. An outrage tiki mask would have at least piqued my interest.
What are you wearing?
Hahaha, that’s how I read it at first, too. I can confirm we most definitely do not sext. But for the record, we do send out various reminder emails if your account is going to expire, and our payment processor sends out reminder emails having to do with renewals and expired credit cards, and things like that.
MAGA T-shirt, MAGA hat, and without an offer of any kind of branded pants (‘nother missed opportunity there) as $exting $wag, a kilt folded out of Trump wrapping paper.
Tres $exy, non?
Better yet. Don’t own a cell phone. I live in everlasting peace without one.
I am so happy to be a hick in the sticks.
I blame WinRED.com. If you give to any GOP candidate using this, you are gonna be spammed by *all* the GOP candidates.
My grandma would fall for this stuff.
Tinfoil of course,I’m on Ricochet.
That’s no shame. When I read about some of the scams people (and usually older people) fall for, it’s just astounding. And very sad.
Good to know. And why, even if I could score an outrage tiki mask as swag just this once, I’d be tempted not to, since politicians are worse than vampires: once you invite one in, the rest might invite themselves.
There have been a few that almost got me. I’ve had medical debt hit my credit in the past, and my life is still somewhat medically complicated, so especially if something looks enough like a medical debt collection or settlement…
So far, I haven’t been fooled. But it means all the tactics like what @davidfoster describes in comment #4 make me extra-angry when I spot them.
Both sides are brutal. I wrote about my own experience after the last election.
Nothing is worse than a successful strategy to raise cash because the technique is then copied by everybody and his brother. Mothership Strategies, the Progressive Trio from Hell, pioneered these kind of “churn and burn” operations. (If you’re on Twitter you can’t avoid their phony petition harvests where every other word is written in all caps. “Nancy Pelosi is on the VERGE of OVERTURNING Citizens United! All we NEED are 78 more SIGNATURES on our PETITION!”)
This crap makes public financing of campaigns attractive… right up until you realize how bad that would really be.
Then avoid the PIT at all costs. 😁
I blame this on Richard Viguerie. :) I see he’s still above ground and kicking at 86, with his own website, Conservative HQ (no link because I’ve never read it).
A feature not a bug.
I wish they would understand that those messages have a negative rate of return with me. I am much less likely to give the party money now because of the unsolicited invasive insincere spamming.
IM me your email address and I’ll send you a request for $$ myself. No need to sign up to other websites, we can cover all your importuning needs here in house.
I don’t think any of mine have come from conservative sites. If you give money to one Republican (or Democrat) that’s when it starts. And they have your e-mail and phone number because when you charge the donation to your card, you have to serve up that info.
I always text back STOP when I get the texts. And my spam filter is pretty good, about 50-60% of the e-mails go to the junk folder. And I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize (although these days most of those are from health insurance marketers, not politicians.)
If you check the actual e-mail addresses: if they are from McConnell or some other senator, it’s from the NRSC; from a congressman it’s from the NRCC, etc. For all I know, some of the candidates sell their donor’s addresses to other candidates. But they ALL share with their respective committees.
But I don’t want to write a check, so…….
True to form, I was wearing my blue “Proud to be HUMAN SCUM! NeverTrump 2020” tee shirt today.