The topic of this episode is, “How can the average American influence a member of Congress?”
A lot of Americans feel no connection to the US Congress. If you asked them, they probably could not name their members in the House of Representatives and their Senators. And few voters have had a conversation with their legislators, or have tried to persuade them by sending a letter or email to their legislators.
I am not picking on the average voter. I can tell you that before I started writing a doctoral dissertation on Congress in my late 20s, I had never been in contact with a representative or Senator. It simply had not occurred to me, nor did I believe that if I asked these people in suits who were hundreds of miles away from me, they would help me.
What was lost on me and is lost on so many other Americans is this basic truth: if you don’t tell Congress what you want, then how can you expect it to do what you want? Voting for candidates who support policies you prefer is important, but it’s not enough. You need to communicate to your legislators to remind them of what you want and to let them know that your vote in the next election is not to be taken for granted.
So how can the average American get his voice heard on Capitol Hill? Here to help me answer this question is Brad Fitch, the author of the book, The Citizen’s Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials (Sunwater, 2025). Brad knows an awful lot about Capitol Hill—he has been there for 40 years and previously served as the CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation and a congressional staffer.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Brad, welcome to the program.
Brad Fitch:
Thank you, Kevin, for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
Some listeners out there probably are thinking, “Oh, give me a break, there’s no point in average Americans trying to talk to Congress. Legislators only care what rich and powerful people think. They only listen to lobbyists, donors, and special interests.” So, let me ask you: do legislators care what the average American thinks?
Brad Fitch:
They absolutely do, and they do for two reasons. They do it for moral reasons. They do believe it’s their responsibility to listen to their constituents. If you talk to most members of Congress, they believe that’s their primary responsibility. In fact, the survey that the Congressional Management Foundation did of members of Congress a few years ago in looking at their job description, that was the number one thing they said: listening to their constituents.
Of course, they have a political reason to do so as well. These are political creatures. They’re going to be up for re-election, and they don’t want to be viewed as being out of touch with their constituents. So they very much do look for ways. And in fact, in the last 15 years, the different methods for interacting with Congress have actually increased. There are more doors and windows being opened onto the institution than any time in American history. It’s easier to interact with Congress now than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
Kevin Kosar:
And there may be listeners out there who aren’t even aware that your average member of the House of Representatives or Senator actually has staff who are assigned to respond to constituents. They’re both in Washington, DC, but also in the home states and districts.
Brad Fitch:
Yeah, if you actually took a look at the office budget for a member of the House of Representatives, about half the time of the staff is being spent interacting with constituents.
In the state offices, these sometimes have the title of caseworker or field representative, where they’re interacting with individual citizens who are having some sort of problem with the federal government, from a lost Social Security check to trying to get a community development block grant for the local downtown.
In Washington, staff spend time responding to constituent correspondence. Every congressional office on the House side gets anywhere from 30,000 to 150,000 emails a year. By the way, that’s not spam. That’s actual constituent communications, usually facilitated by a third party like a trade association or nonprofit that you may belong to as a citizen. But there’s a significant amount of time that members spend interacting with constituents, as well as their staff interacting with constituents.
Kevin Kosar:
So, your book really is what it says it is, a how-to guide on influencing elected officials. For someone who wants Congress to do—or not do—something, what are a few of the options available? How do they get started?
Brad Fitch:
Usually where it starts is some motivating factor. Nobody wakes up in the morning on a Tuesday and says, “Oh, I think I wanna engage my member of Congress.” They see something on TV that ticks them off, or they get an email or see something on the internet, and they get motivated.
And they can take a variety of actions at that point. The simplest thing to do is to go to the member’s website and to drop them a message through the web forms that they have all set up on their websites to collect information from constituents. As long as you put in a local address with a local ZIP code, that is gonna be read by a staffer; we haven’t gotten to the point where AI is reading the mail and responding to the mail yet, but who knows where we’ll be in a year or so given the speed at which AI is taking over. So that will get read, especially if it’s individualized communications, and that’s one of the lessons from the research that I’ve done over the years: it literally goes into a separate pile to a staffer that has to respond to it, as opposed to the form communications that come in by the millions that, again, are generated by associations and nonprofits. There’s always a human being behind that, but it’s usually what I call facilitated communications as opposed to organic communications.
There’s a variety of other ways that members of Congress have set up to interact with constituents. Every member of Congress is on three social media platforms: Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram, and they’re all collecting data on those platforms. Now, I did a focus group with chiefs of staff and communications directors about 18 months ago, and the biggest change there was the introduction of social media in such a huge way that social media is now ubiquitous in our democracy and in Congress as well. What’s changed in the last 15 years or so is that around 2010, Congress viewed social media with a much more optimistic view. They thought this would really enhance and democratize the citizen engagement process. But like everybody else, Congress has come to hate Facebook and X, but not so much Instagram. It’s kind of interesting there; it’s still got a little bit of a glow to it. But they monitor it religiously. They don’t want to see, let’s say, someone important say something on X and they not respond; X is definitely viewed as more of the grass tops or VIP section of constituent interaction. It might be the head of the Rotary Club, someone who runs a food bank, etc., whereas Facebook is considered more of the general population, and they monitor it very carefully.
The other thing that’s changed in the last 20 years is the introduction of telephone town hall meetings, and I’m really high on telephone town hall meetings for a couple of reasons. One, they’re incredibly scalable. I talked to a member of Congress from Nebraska a couple of days ago, and he got 15,000 people in a telephone town hall meeting just a few months ago. In 2021, more than three million Americans participated in a telephone town hall meeting. Now again, you probably won’t get your question answered. Only about 7 to 10 people out of 10,000 are going to get it, but you can try. And, by the way, I’ve been on three telephone town hall meetings with my local member of Congress in Northern Virginia, and I’ve gotten questions in twice. So it can happen. So that’s another way of doing it.
Some members are still doing in-person meetings. That’s obviously a really personal way because the average number of people at a personal, uh, in-person town hall meeting is around 25 to 30 people. So that’s a very intimate way to interact with your member of Congress. And finally, and I know we’ll talk about this later, being part of a trade association or nonprofit is a way to have your voice amplified because you’re sitting there speaking with many other Americans who share your view on whatever it might be. It might be a nonprofit that wants to stop cuts to food banks, or it may be a trade association of farmers that wants to overturn onerous Department of Agriculture regulations dealing with ponds or something like that. So that’s another way for people to have their voices heard.
Kevin Kosar:
I’m glad you mentioned members of Congress and their websites. As you were describing why we should take a look at these, I pulled up the website for US Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, and it’s very easy to navigate to the part of her site that has constituent services by the number: here are the success stories, here are the cases closed, here’s the money returned to constituents, here’s the town halls she’s held, etc, and there are little buttons for Facebook, X, and Instagram. She even goes so far as to have YouTube and BlueSky. So, members of Congress are accessible. You don’t have to just look up their address in a phone book, draft a letter, put it in the mailbox, and then hope for a response. You can really reach out and contact them and their staff fairly easily.
Brad Fitch:
I just want to set expectations here. You picked actually one of my favorite members of Congress. When I was at the Congressional Management Foundation and helped create a program called the Democracy Awards, which was like the Oscars for Congress, Congresswoman Houlahan was the first freshman to win and the first three-time award winner. She’s a terrific member of Congress, so her site’s probably going to be a little better than most.
But the one caveat I would add is that while members of Congress are very good at listening to their constituents, their responses leave a lot to be desired because they really follow this 1970s, 1980s playbook of, “Let’s go to the Congressional Research Service and write something really bland back to the constituent.” And what happens is constituents think they didn’t get their letter read. It’s not personalized very well. If you got a letter in 2026 on immigration and you compared it to a letter that someone got in 1986 on immigration, I don’t think you’d be able to tell the difference. One of my critiques of Congress was a great phrase from Mario Cuomo: that you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose. And they take that a little too seriously. And the people that are drafting these email responses are often young staffers, and they just need a lot more help in creating personalized communications that communicate to the constituent, “I’m listening. I care. I hear you. I see you.” And we just don’t see enough of that in the congressional realm these days.
Kevin Kosar:
I could see the lack of empathy that may come through in these letters can be frustrating. But constituents, of course, should remember that if you write to your member of Congress and say, for example, “Here’s what you should do about immigration. Here’s what I feel amounts to amnesty, and I’m against amnesty,” you are one person, so don’t be surprised if a representative or Senator doesn’t send you a letter back firmly committing to a position. Part of what these people have to do is to bargain. And so if they put in a letter to you, “This is precisely what I’m gonna do, and I refuse to pass any bill that doesn’t do this,” they’ve just handed you something that you can wave around, sell to an opposition researcher, or do whatever you want with. So they are going to probably speak in generalities, but nonetheless, they are hearing you, right?
Brad Fitch:
Yeah, everything is getting through. Staff really have to read everything and monitor everything, and it’s a gargantuan responsibility. Congress gets about 50 million emails a year between the House and Senate, and by the way, that’s not spam. That’s constituent emails that are now flowing through address verification systems to ensure that constituents are getting through. It is a gargantuan task that I spent many years focusing on. In fact, my first task as an intern was working in a congressional office in the summer of 1982 with an IBM Selectric typewriter. So that shows you the journey I have gone on from electric typewriters to AI over my 40 years of working with Congress.
Kevin Kosar:
Your book mentions that face-to-face meetings are an option. Hearing me say that, the listener might be wondering, “What am I supposed to do, get on a plane and fly to Washington? Can I even get inside the Capitol?”
Brad Fitch:
Many people do do that. They’re called fly-ins, where associations and nonprofits will bring groups of people—we’re just finishing up what we call fly-in season.
But you don’t have to do that. Members of Congress really love meeting with constituents in the district. There are a couple different ways they do that. You can get meetings with your member of Congress in their state or district offices. There are many recesses when you —especially if you’re bringing in some of your neighbors and bringing in three or four more people, and you say, “I want tp come in and talk to you about deforestation,” or, “I want talk to you about saving the whales,” or, “I wanna talk to you about overregulation of small businesses,” and you have three or four people that will join you—will certainly get a meeting with a senior staff member in the district or state.
You might also get a meeting with the member of Congress. They’re constantly wanting to make sure that they’re busy interacting with constituents. If you are a small business or you do work at a place of work that frankly is a good photo opportunity for the member of Congress, and you work with your business or with your colleagues to invite the legislator to that location, most members of Congress will have a section of their website where you can fill in a form to request a meeting. Nearly every member of the House and Senate now has a “Contact Me” page and a web form to fill out.
Here are a couple of tips, though, if you’re looking for a meeting with a member of Congress. The most important one is don’t be specific with the time. If you say to them, “I want to meet you on Friday, August 11th at 3:00 PM,” they can easily just say, “I’m sorry, I’m already booked at that hour.” But if you say, “I want to come into your office sometime during the six-week August recess, anytime, Congresswoman,” you’re probably going to get a meeting with somebody during that period of time, assuming you’re talking about an issue that is relevant. If you’re coming in talking about the school crossing guard not being paid enough money, that’s not gonna get their attention because that’s not a federal issue. But if you have a federal issue that concerns you—everything from affordability to environment to climate change to regulation of small businesses to overtaxation—they will want to hear from you. That’s what they do.
I did an interview with a Senate state director, and she gave me a great quote when asked about who she listens to. She said, “We’re apolitical in this state. We don’t care if you’re a Democrat, independent, Republican, socialist, or communist. We are going to meet with you.” And the in-state people have a massive philosophy towards customer service, and they do it because that’s in their bones. The people that go to work in the offices in the district or state are almost like social workers. They really are making an investment in constituents and really want to do a good job, and they want to be seen as doing a good job. And, frankly, they want to make sure that the member of Congress hears that they were listening. One of the things that terrifies congressional staff is if the member of Congress is picking up their dry cleaning in their hometown, and the customer behind them says, “You know, I contacted your office and wanted to talk to one of your staff members, and nobody got back to me.” That’s a big deal. Staffers get fired for that. Members of Congress take that very, very seriously. So that’s why, when you make those requests, they are going to be taken seriously, and they will try to find time for you.
Kevin Kosar:
You mentioned members being back in their home states and districts. Listeners might be under the illusion that members of Congress are in Washington most days of the year, but that is incorrect.
Brad Fitch:
Right, and one of the things they get frustrated about is—and Congress perpetuates this too—the idea when they’re not in session, that they’re somehow in recess on vacation. It’s absolutely absurd.
Members of Congress just have two responsibilities, legislative and representational. When they’re back home, they’re fulfilling that second responsibility of being your representative. Research that we did at the Congressional Management Foundation showed that when members of Congress were in session, they were working an average of 70 hours a week, and when they were back home, they were working an average of just under 60 hours a week.
Now, I’m talking about their work ethic, not their work product. I’m perfectly aware of the fact that the American public doesn’t think much of what Congress is doing these days, but you can’t fault them for not trying to work hard. So when they’re back home, they’re doing the types of things that you want them doing. They’re mixing it up with constituents. They’re talking to local business leaders. They’re going to various events around the district or state that allow them to stay in touch with their constituents. In the summer, they’re going to be at the state fair. They’re going to be at the county fair. They’re gonna be in places where they can meet with constituents. And so hopefully, if you want to meet them, you can just contact their district or state office and ask them if they’re going to be at an event near you, if they’re going to have a Congress at Your Corner where they’re just literally fielding questions from people who walk up to them. They’re doing fewer of those because of security reasons, and I don’t blame them. And in fact, I generally advise members to keep that to a minimum because telephone town halls are such a good investment per person. But they are there back in the district or state, and they’re not on vacation.
One of the bigger problems members have in their personal lives is they frankly don’t relax enough, see their family enough, and go on vacation enough. They’re workaholics. They’re type A personalities that just really want to stay in touch with their constituents.
Kevin Kosar:
We have talked a bit about how a single individual can try to get the attention of a legislature, but is there a kind of strength in numbers?
Brad Fitch:
The best way to do it is to do a little of your own research.
If you’re in a business that has a trade association, it is always wise to be a little active in that association. That means signing up for their government relations newsletters to find out what’s going on in your industry, how Congress is affecting your business. It’s a very important part and role that many industries play, and everyone’s got a trade association. And then if you care about a cause that interests you, sign up for the nonprofit’s e-newsletter that relates to government relations activities. You can go to their website; sometimes they’re called action centers or action alerts that the organization will send you, and if they do send you something, it does make sense to forward it and send it in.
Again, I would not be surprised if you’re disappointed with the response. I did this myself. It wasn’t an experiment. I actually got an e-mail from an organization that I belong to and support, and they wanted legislation co-sponsored, and on the website, one of my Senators did not co-sponsor. And so I co-sent that senator a letter asking him, “Why not? Why don’t you co-sponsor this bill?” I won’t say who it was, but I got the crappiest letter back I’ve ever seen. It didn’t reference my issue at all. It was a generic letter on healthcare, and he’s still not a co-sponsor. But I’ll use other means to probably get their attention. But again, you can do it. When you do send in multiple communications, that does help. And it doesn’t take a lot to get the attention of staff, especially in the House of Representatives, but it’s usually got to be done over a compressed period of time. So if you do get that action alert or that email from the organization you support, it’s very important that you take action as soon as possible because that tally will be done by that staff, and if they can get 50 or 100 people from their constituency that is asking for the same thing, and it’s not controversial or doesn’t cost a ton of money, they’re likely to go in the direction of their constituents’ request.
Kevin Kosar:
One of the things I found really neat about your book is that, in a way, you’re trying to help the average American realize that if you’re a citizen of a republic, you too have responsibilities. If you want your legislature to hear you, you have to speak up. You can’t just stay silent and get angry when Congress doesn’t do what you want. You have got to speak up.
Brad Fitch:
The person who said it better than you or I, Kevin, was our third president, Thomas Jefferson, who said, “We in America do not have a government of the majority. We have a government of the majority who participate.” And so it’s really important to participate in a variety of different ways, and we recognize that people are cynical right now about, and have been for the last 40 or 50 years. But that doesn’t mean they don’t listen, especially on issues that are not what I call reputational or electoral. There are only a few issues that fall into that category: guns, immigration, and abortion, sometimes healthcare. Those are going to be really tough to get a member to go from a yay to a nay or vice versa. But that’s like 3% of what Congress does.
The other 97% are more minor issues. You might call them niche issues, but to some people they’re very important. If you have a parent or a grandparent who has Alzheimer’s, you may want to see more funding invested by the federal government in finding a cure to Alzheimer’s. If you care about the welfare of animals, you may want to stop medical uses of experimentation with animals being used in drug studies. If you are a farmer and you’re being overly regulated on how you manage your farm, you may want to go to the Department of Agriculture or to a member of Congress and ask for legislation to be introduced to overturn a regulation. Those aren’t front page stories. Nobody won or lost their job in Congress over whether or not animals were used in experiments. That is actually a good thing because that means that Congress has a lot more flexibility to support your issue or oppose your issue. They’re not having leadership breathing down their necks. They’re not going to lose an election over it, and they’re not going to be something that’s going to be written up in their epitaph. So they do actually have flexibility to support you on those issues that often are the most important ones to you.
Kevin Kosar:
That’s right. There are some issues that are useful for reelection and reputational purposes: those high salience ones that we’re all familiar with, like guns, abortion, immigration, etc. And then there are all the other issues. And on those other issues, members of Congress do have flexibility and are open to listening to you about them.
Alright, there are so many more questions I could ask about how the average American can influence Congress, but we are out of time. So, listeners who want to learn more should get your book, The Citizen’s Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials. Brad Fitch, thank you for joining me.
Brad Fitch:
Thank you for having me, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on X and tagging @AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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