Campaigners See Relational Organizing as Workaround for iOS 26

Campaigners and political consultants are taking a new look at a battle-tested tactic as Apple prepares to launch new spam filters for the country’s tens of millions of iPhone users: Relational organizing.

The coming release of iOS 26 – the newest update to the software that powers iPhones – is set to introduce new spam filters for texts that will place messages from numbers that are not in a users’ contacts to a separate folder for unknown senders. That means that millions of political texts – from GOTV reminders to fundraising pleas – could go unnoticed by users who don’t regularly check their unknown senders folder.

That’s created a headache for campaigns, committees and consultants, who are scrambling to figure out how to get their messages around the filters and in front of voters’ eyeballs.

One potential workaround, according to voter outreach pros, may be relational organizing – a practice pioneered in recent years that essentially boils down to mobilizing volunteers to text or call people in their personal networks in support of a candidate, cause or organization. 

In doing so, campaigners can help ensure that outreach isn’t coming from some random number, but from someone whose number is already saved in a voter’s contact list. 

What’s more, according to Will Long, the founder and CEO of the Republican startup Numinar, voters are more likely to engage when the person contacting them is someone they already know. 

“Not only does it help us get around these iOS 26 constraints, but it’s also just generally more effective,” Long said. “It just makes too much sense. People absolutely should be leveraging this as an alternate channel here.”

Lisa Schneegans, the co-founder and CEO of the political campaign software platform Buzz350, made a similar argument in a recent Substack post. The iOS 26 update is going to make cold texting “a little harder,” she wrote, but campaigns that can effectively combine traditional P2P texting with relational outreach “will actually gain an edge.”

“Apple’s change doesn’t close the door – it just makes the door open wider for campaigns that understand that relationships, not just reach, win elections,” Schneegans wrote.

Fundraising Challenges

Still, the coming iOS update has rankled many in the political world. The National Republican Senatorial Committee warned in a memo last month that the software’s new spam filters could cost Republicans more than $500 million in lost fundraising, and called on Apple to delay the rollout of the update.

“Political texts – even from verified and compliant senders – will be treated as spam by default, silently sent to an ‘Unknown’ inbox with no alerts or notifications,” the July 24 memo reads. “That change has profound implications for our ability to fundraise, mobilize voters, and run digital campaigns.”

Long noted that relational organizing can be somewhat more difficult to scale compared to traditional P2P texting and phone banking operations. But he also argued that “a general decline in the amount of engagement with cold contact” means that campaigners need to broaden their approach, regardless of the iOS update. 

“People aren’t opening the doors as much, they’re not answering phone calls they don’t recognize and they’re also getting overwhelmed with texting,” Long said. “They’re not really engaging with any of it.”

“That’s a real problem,” he added. “And so our whole idea is that the way to get around this is to get political messaging to voters through somebody that they know.”