- never signed up for anything like this,
- never donated to or signed up for emails from the DNC, et al.,
- political texts like this come all the time, and
- I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
Yes.
It’s so cheap to send SMS messages, and you don’t pay for undeliverable messages, so they can just send to random numbers.
They also receive deliverability responses for each number. So they know whether a phone received the message whether or not you reply.
Finally, if you reply STOP you’re unlikely to fit their demographic very well anyway. As in… they’re not trying to reach the type of people who will actively try to avoid receiving these messages.
That said, there’s probably no point replying STOP because most firms just wont honor it in the long term. As in they might not message you for the remainder of that particular messaging project (campaign), but they’ll just start a new campaign tomorrow with a new sender and no “STOP” requests.
It’s not like you can even use Do Not Call features on this anyway, political stuff is exempt (though if it’s fraudulent that’s still bitter tampering/intimidation etc.).