How to Get Your Representatives in Congress to Hear You

[athena]

In the days after the election, while DU was down, I was surfing the Huffington Post and found this extremely useful article about how to approach politicians so that they take notice.

Bottom line: Twitter and Facebook posts don't carry any weight. E-mails are handled by software that sends back automated responses. Snail-mail letters are better. The absolute best thing you can do is call, especially if you can get other people to call as well. Beyond that, show up at town hall meetings; get together with a few other people to form an advocacy group; and make sure the staffers know about you.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/contacting-your-congressional-representative_us_582a0965e4b060adb56f8e95

[Auggie]

1. Bill Mayer tweeted this. I posted to Facebook. Spread it around.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Off to the Greatest page. Let's help keeping this kicked.

Maybe a re-post in a few weeks wouldn't hurt.

we cannot sit on our hands.

[athena]

3. Thank you. This is important.

You're welcome to re-post as well. It's easy to think that one's representatives don't care about the people and can't be made to care, but this former staffer's experience shows that the opposite is true. Politicians spend too much time with lobbyists. They need to hear what the people think, as well.

[MineralMan]

4. Good advice. Here's another way:

Support your representative during campaign. Not with donations, but with personal efforts. Show up as a volunteer and at every meet and greet you can. Talk to him or her at every opportunity, and make sure you re-introduce yourself each time until the rep recognizes you on sight as an ally.

Then, you can communicate and attention will be paid. Staffs have lists of names of people not to ignore. You can be on that list. It works.

[athena]

6. That works if you have a representative who is a liberal and you agree with everything s/he does.

The suggestions made by the staffer apply even if your representatives are Tea-Party nutcases. The point is to get your representatives to hear your perspective. They don't necessarily have to know you personally, but they need to hear from their staffers that their constituents are watching the way they vote, and that if they vote, say, to deport undocumented immigrants or privatize social security and Medicare or abolish Obamacare, there will be consequences the next time they're up for re-election.

What I found interesting and important in the staffer's comments is that you don't have to be discouraged that you're talking "only" to a staffer. If enough people make calls that the staffers feel overwhelmed, the representative will hear about it. The staffers, in some ways, are even more important than the representatives themselves.

[stopwastingmymoney]

5. KnR nt

[volstork]

7. Thank you, Athena!

This is valuable information.

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. Keeping this kicked............very important. n/t

[Nevernose]

9. I suspect we'll all be using these tips

Over the next four years.

[athena]

10. I hope so, but

considering how fast this thread sank, I am not so sure.

[athena]

11. A follow-up.

Here is another article about how to call your representative's office about Trump:

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/what-you-need-to-know-if-you-want-to-call-your-representative-about-trump

Regardless of how you contact your representative, however, you need to actually know what you want to say to them. Leonard says the key is to be specific. Trump is really bad, but simply telling your member, "Trump is really bad" is apparently not effective. "The more specific you can be, the better. The clearer and more direct you can be, the better," he emphasized. So, for example, you could go through some of Trump's proposed policies and explain to your representative why you're against them. Leonard recommends calling about one issue at a time.

The catch here is that talking to your representative is most successful in aggregate. When you call in about an issue, the staffer on the other end adds your complaint (or support) to a tally. Every call is logged and added to a report that gets sent to your congressman on a weekly or monthly basis. If the staffers get a lot of calls about one issue in a day, however, that gets sent to your congressman more urgently. In short, the more calls your congressman gets about a specific issue, the more likely they are to take action. For this reason, Ellsworth recommends that, in the coming months, you try to link up with advocacy organizations that support what you care about and follow their calls to action.

When a lot of people start calling about concrete legislation, that's when you can have the most sway. Your representative won't want to vote for something that it appears everyone in their district is against. Ellsworth adds that even if your representative holds the opposing view on the issue you're calling about—which is likely in a Republican-controlled Congress—it can still have an impact.

(Emphases mine.)

We could organize this on DU. Every week, we could organize around an issue and call our representatives about that issue. We could have a page on DU where everyone can look up the phone number for their representative's district office. If a large number of DU members did this, we could have an impact. Skinner, are you listening?