WASHINGTON — Republicans could lose millions of dollars in ad revenue due to a new Apple software update that implements message filtering capabilities designed to crack down on spam and unwanted messages.
The latest update, rolled out in Apple’s iOS 26, would target political messages by sending them to a separate inbox without any alerts or notifications, the National Republican Senatorial Committee argued in an internal memo obtained by the Deseret News. That change could cost the NRSC more than $25 million in revenue alone — amounting to more than $500 million in losses for the Republican Party at large, the memo warns.
“Every political message — shortcode, long code, doesn’t matter — gets pushed into the dark,” the memo states. “The only workaround — getting a voter to reply — is increasingly rare and entirely at the mercy of Apple’s unclear rules. How will a voter reply if they never get the message?”
Apple announced the changes in early June, which allow users to screen messages from unknown senders to provide “more control over who appears in their conversation list.” The unknown messages would be directed to a separate folder. Users would need to manually mark the messages as “known” to transfer to their main inbox.
All texts will be silenced until a user accepts, according to Apple.
That change would be detrimental to GOP fundraising efforts, NRSC warned, and could harm efforts to mobilize voters and disseminate information. The group, which acts as the main fundraising arm for Senate Republicans, claimed it has complied with “rigorous standards” in its political text campaigns for years, including “full documentation, opt-in proof, and message samples via Campaign Verify and The Campaign Registry.”
Not only will the filter changes harm fundraising — the NRSC cited data showing 70% of small-dollar donations are contributed via text and iPhones make up 60% of mobile devices in the United States — but the memo also contends it will negatively affect Election Day reminders, rapid response messaging, and other forms of voter contact.
“These are time-sensitive, critical communications,” the memo states. “iOS 26 breaks all of that.”
The NRSC circulated the memo to groups urging them to “push back,” accusing trade groups of being “asleep at the wheel.”
“But we have only a few weeks left before the public release,” the memo states. “If we’re going to push back, it has to be now. We have a very narrow window to fix this.”
The rollout of the iOS 26 update is expected to debut in mid-September. The Deseret News contacted spokespeople for Apple for comment.
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