An upcoming iPhone update from Apple has raised an alarm among Republicans fundraisers in the United States, who fear it could block key voter outreach and fundraising messages. Tech giant’s new filtration system, due for rollout in September, may disproportionately impact Republican campaigns that rely heavily on text-based outreach, Fox News reported.
According to a report in Campaigns and Elections, the GOP’s Senate campaign arm is warning that a coming update to Apple’s iOS could cost the committee more than $25 million in lost fundraising. The National Republican Senatorial Committee sounded an alarm over a July 2024 memo that the new spam filters for text messages which Apple is set to roll out as part of iOS 26.
Those filters will send messages from numbers that are not in a users’ contacts to a separate folder for unknown senders. iPhone users will then have the chance to mark the number as known, reply to the message or delete it altogether. That creates a headache for political fundraisers, according to the NRSC’s memo, because iPhone users aren’t likely to check their unknown senders folder. Consequently, it argues, a large swath of political outreach, including GOTV messages to fundraising texts, will go unnoticed.
Text messages from known numbers saved on an individual’s phone are expected to continue alerting recipients and sending the messages to their typical text app.
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Apple’s new update is headache for Republicans Sean Dollman, founding partner of American Made Media Company, which was the parent firm of Launchpad Strategies and was the exclusive digital agency for Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, said that the move was no surprise.
“It’s no surprise that Big Tech wants to stop Donald Trump and other Republicans from communicating with people, because they’ve tried every other method to interfere already,” Sean Dollman, founding partner of American Made Media Company, the parent company of Launchpad Strategies, which was the exclusive digital firm for Trump 2024, told Fox News Digital.
“Big Tech has suppressed him, suspended him, and banned him outright. And now they’re trying to make it so he can’t text anybody either. But MAGA won’t be stopped, and MAGA will always find a way.”
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Apple is expected to roll out its latest update, iOS 26, in September. Launchpad Strategies served as the Trump 2024 campaign’s exclusive digital firm, raising $509 million for Trump and a further $18 million from 40 other clients during the election year.
In addition to the text filters, the new software is expected to introduce other features like call screening, which will field phone calls from numbers not in a users’ contacts by collecting the caller’s name and th
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