Brad Fitch’s Citizens Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials (2010, updated 2022) reveals Americans wield more power than they think—Congress receives 50M+ emails yearly, with some offices getting 180K, yet personalized messages matter most. His advocacy led to a FEMA mental wellness grant after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, signed by Biden in December 2022, and Alzheimer’s funding surged 700% due to grassroots efforts. Skeptics cite Citizens United and Musk’s donations, but Fitch argues access ≠ influence, as lawmakers prioritize constituent voices for political survival. Despite gerrymandering’s distortions, he insists most members feel obligated to listen—though not always act—proving direct engagement still shapes policy. [Automatically generated summary]
He's the author of Citizens Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials.
Mr. Fitzville, in 2010, your first appearance on the Washington Journal for the first edition of your book, you said that Americans have more influence over their elected officials than they realize.
But the challenge is that most people don't see most of what the Congress does because you see the big debates over taxes and immigration and abortion and sometimes health care.
Most members of Congress, frankly, are not involved in those big debates.
That's leadership or committee chairs.
Most members of Congress are meeting with constituents to determine whether or not to increase funding for research on Alzheimer's or whether horses should be transported on double-decker trucks or whether ophthalmologists or optometrists get to use laser surgery at VA hospitals.
Well, interestingly, one of the things that has changed in the last 15 years since the first and second edition is they've continued to open up more doors and be more accessible.
Once again, I know that flies in the face of popular belief, but the two big technological changes to how Congress interacts with constituents are first the adoption of social media.
Members just jumped into that swimming pool with both feet with Twitter, now X, Instagram, and Facebook.
And then the other major development is telephone town hall meetings, which is especially during the pandemic, was one of the only ways that constituents could interact with them.
And the reason I see so much promise in telephone town hall meetings is they're scalable.
In 2021, more than 3 million Americans participated in a congressional telephone town hall meeting.
And there's very few other reforms to our democracy that has that kind of promise.
Well, every message that comes in is scanned and reviewed by a staff member.
Most of these emails are facilitated and generated by trade associations and nonprofits who are exercising their First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
But individualizing communications, all the research that I did when I was at the Congressional Management Foundation shows that that is much more powerful than a form email.
When you localize it, talk about it personally, how it's going to affect you, your community, your family, you have much more influence.
We want our viewers to join us in this conversation this morning.
Have you tried to influence your elected official?
If so, we want to hear from you this morning.
If you're looking for recommendations on how to influence your elected official, call in this morning as well.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
And Independents, 202-748-8002.
You can text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003.
Just include your first name, city, and state.
Brad Fitch, is there a success story of constituents, either a constituent solely influencing an elected official or a group who have come together to change the minds of their elected representative?
There's a great case study in the book that I heard about when I was doing research for the second edition.
There was a woman, Mania Cholinski, who lived in Boston and was at the Boston Marathon in 2013 when the bombing happened.
And, you know, people were killed, hundreds of people were injured.
She was fortunate, she felt, because she had not been physically injured, but she realized within a very short period of time that she was suffering from PTSD.
When she went to try to get support from the government for help to manage her mental wellness, she realized that FEMA, while they had grants for people and communities that were hurt physically due to natural disasters or terrorism, there was nothing for mental wellness.
Well, Manya told her congresswoman, Ianna Presley, who said, you're right, there ought to be a law.
And in December of 19, in 2022, Joe Biden signed into law a new grant program to help people who are injured mentally with mental wellness issues as a result of that one woman's story.
On the group side, one of the most successful group stories, I also did a case study in this is the Alzheimer's Association.
Alzheimer's is a devastating disease, dementia or Alzheimer's.
Two out of five Americans are either going to have dementia or Alzheimer's or are going to care for somebody who dies.
In the last 10 years, they have organized what they call an ambassador program where they get one person who's very educated, who's connected to the disease in some way, and they go talk to their member of Congress and say, there's thousands of your constituents that are affected by this.
It is one of the most successful grassroots efforts in decades.
In the last 10 years, the amount of money that the federal government spends to try to find a cure to Alzheimer's has increased by 700%.
And you don't read about these stories in the local news.
You know, success stories like this don't usually get the type of news coverage, and they should, because they really are our democracy working the way it's supposed to.
I had been working in and around the Congress, and I now have been working with the Congress for 40 years.
And some years ago, I was in the private sector and had an opportunity to work with a publishing house and said, hey, I've got these ideas on how to influence Congress and how Congress works.
I want to write in a very practical way that people find approachable and easy to read.
I'm a former broadcast reporter, so I do write in more of the spoken word than the written word.
From the handbook, by design, the American Congress is slow and deliberative.
Individual legislators must wrestle with this deliberative system, blending their own beliefs into a legislative melting pot that ideally produces positive societal outcomes.
They use a kind of political math to make decisions, weighing multiple factors when determining whether to vote for a bill, co-sponsor legislation, or support funding for an initiative.
When all the details are burned away, legislators generally follow three voices when making a decision.
One member of Congress called these voices the three H's, heart, head, and health, meaning political health.
All the research on the psychology and the neuroscience of persuasion tells us that emotional stories are more powerful than rational arguments.
Once again, I was interviewing a member and asked him about a difficult decision.
And he said, I was torn on what to do on whether or not to support or oppose research for stem cell research, which is very controversial at the federal level.
It's my hope that this research one day might lead to a cure to me and others like me.
And the Congressman told me how he did further research, and he ended up co-sponsoring legislation that would provide federal funding for stem cell research.
And he was a pro-life Republican.
And then head political health.
They're always going to be doing the math.
They're always going to look at how many constituents are affected by a particular issue.
Is this going to affect them politically?
And they want to know how many people are really going to be helped or hurt as a result of their decision.
You know, usually if I try to contact Congress, I don't try to call them.
I email them.
But I'll be honest with you, there's two reasons I think we're just wasting our time.
One is Citizens United.
I mean, you have people like Elon Musk that contribute $200 and what, $71 million to Donald Trump's last presidential bid here.
The other thing is Congress, so many of them now are doing the insider trading that I don't really think that they, I think everything we tell them goes in one ear and out the other.
The reality is, yes, campaign contributors do get the ears of members of Congress.
I mean, that is just a known fact.
The research on that has been actually pretty clear and convincing.
But the research also shows is there's no correlation between campaign contributions and legislative outcomes.
I really hope, Thomas, you rethink contacting your member of Congress.
You've got some great lawmakers in Florida, and I know they want to hear from you.
If you write an individual letter that just says, this is my concern, or an email, it will get read.
The response may not be very well written.
That's one complaint I have with my members in Congress: they are a little robotic in how they respond, but they do read everything that comes into the mail.
Yeah, I do agree with that strategy of reaching out and communicating.
I'll offer a couple other pieces of advice.
One, going in groups helps.
So if you're with a homeowners association and you want to meet with your local county council member or city council member because you're concerned about property taxes and you pull together five or six people at your home in someone's living room or go into their office, that's going to make more of a difference than just one person.
I mean, I want to show this YouGov poll that we were talking about earlier today based on what you know was the shooting of in Minneapolis of the man there, justified or not justified.
And you can see the answers there.
20% said not, was justified, 48% said not justified, 32% said not sure.
How influential, not this topic, but how influential are polls like this conducted in snapshot of time on politicians?
At the national level, when we're talking about these big federal issues like the one you just talked about, immigration reform, they definitely shape members of Congress's thinking and behavior.
And I'm speaking as someone who worked intimately with members of Congress and was literally in the room when the decisions were made to do certain things.
So when you're talking about these major issues, abortion, immigration, taxes, sometimes health care, you can definitely see the movement like you.
I'm a reader of all the Washington publications and you can see what's going on right now with Republicans on immigration and on health care.
And those polls are moving it.
But I'll tell you what else is moving it is the calls into their offices and the emails they're getting into their offices.
That really, when they start seeing those volumes go up and they know that it's largely organic and not facilitated, they pay attention.
In fact, one of my most famous stories I heard was a member of Congress was coaching first base at his son's Little League game and a woman, mom from the other team came over and gave him a lecture on Middle East peace policy.
And the reason I love that is because he couldn't leave first base.
She's got him trapped and for three outs.
And so, you know, yeah, they do observe it.
I knew one senator, she told me how she would go shopping at the grocery store and she loved doing that.
She said it would take two to three hours.
She learned very early on, don't get the ice cream at the beginning of the visit because it's going to melt by the time you get out.
And she just talked to people in the aisles and they're like, amazing.
United States Senator doing her own grocery shopping.
But she said it was a great way to stay in touch with people.
I mean, data companies can, but there are so, as Greta said, they're getting tens of thousands of emails and letters and calls a month.
They don't have time to do that.
They represent all constituents.
Again, one of the myths out there is there is a huge dividing line in congressional offices between their official activities and their campaign activities.
They do not mix.
And when they do, they usually get caught and sometimes get in trouble either with the ethics committee or with election laws.
I will say the reason they're asking you your address is both by law and by practice, members of Congress can only represent their own constituents.
They're not allowed to use their office resources to talk to other constituents in the state.
Again, this is the republic that Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Madison gave us, that we are represented in a representative democracy.
It's not a parliament, so it's not the party that is representing you.
It is your individual lawmaker.
And the challenges with phone calls, Carolyn, is that, you know, a phone call, you really can communicate up or down, yay or nay.
When I worked at the Congressional Management Foundation, we did surveys of congressional staff.
And one of the things that we saw is they are constantly scanning X and Facebook and Instagram.
And it's just those three for comments.
Now, often they're looking for influencers or people at the highest level, but they don't have consistent systems for reporting that data out as they do with email messages coming into the congressional office where they have better, more sophisticated technology to tally what those pros and cons are.
So with social media, it's much more of a cacophony that they're trying to capture.
But the advantage of X is it's wicked faster, right?
You know, if somebody says something on Twitter, you get five or six people within the same hour talking about a topic on Twitter.
The communications director will bring that to the lawmaker.
In fact, I'll give you an example from C-SPAN on how I saw it happen once.
I was waiting to come on the show, Washington Journal, some years ago, and a congresswoman was on Washington Journal and was taking questions on the debt ceiling.
And her press secretary and I were in the waiting room.
And she's out there looking at her phone and she's watching the congresswoman.
What do you think about them coming on a program like this where they get to hear from real people, sit down and do an interview and take questions and comments from the public?
And that's why many of them like in-person town hall meetings.
If they're doing in-person town hall meetings, then they're doing it because they like it.
And if they start hearing the same thing in different parts of their district, they feel like that's the tip of the iceberg and they're capturing it.
Remember, I was working as a communications director for a House member, and we're in Glen Burney, and we hear a question in Glen Burney, Maryland, and then we go to Annapolis the same week having a telephone town hall meeting.
Same question comes up from a different person.
The congressman comes back to the chief of staff in Washington and says, Everybody's talking about it.
I'm like, two people are talking about it, Congressman.
But anyway, that's their impression.
So, yeah, they really do listen carefully and kind of use this as another gauge, another sort of stone in the mosaic of information they collect.
Mine says 102nd Congress has all the contact for the politicians, which just I can't understand because I personally wouldn't shake hands with a politician.
David, Brad Fitch, talk about the sentiment there because you see it reflected in polls that people don't trust members of Congress, their approval ratings are very low.
Does that mean that elected officials are hearing from constituents less and less?
Oh, I don't think they're hearing from them less and less, but I do understand the sentiment with what people see in the media that the coverage is so negative.
But I've got to tell you, I've been affiliated with the United States Congress for 40 years as a staffer and as a consultant.
Most members of Congress are really decent, hardworking public servants.
And let me give you another data point that shows that they're listening to constituents.
When I worked at the Congressional Management Foundation, we did surveys of congressional staff between 2003 and 2023.
We did five major surveys, and we always asked this question: if your member of Congress has not arrived at a firm decision on an issue, how much influence might the following advocacy strategies directed to the Washington office have on his or her decision?
So hundreds of staffers answering this question.
In 20 years of surveys, the number one answer always was in-person visit from constituents.
I joke, members of Congress are the best pollsters in the world because they're the only pollsters who, if they get the answer wrong, they lose their job.
They're actually, most of them are representing a disease or a doctor in Washington, D.C., because we have a lot of diseases in a lot of different medical professions.
And their credibility is essential to their own welfare and their financial future.
Because if you get a lobbyist who starts BSing their member of Congress or their person that they're meeting with, they're not going to get invited back.
They have to be very good experts on their field in their topic when they're interacting with lawmakers.
Yes, thank you, Mr. Fitz, for taking the question.
And thank you, Greta, for being with C-SPAN.
C-SPAN does a wonderful job.
I always support them.
Mr. Fitch, I live in Texas, and we had horrible flooding over the summer.
Dozens of young children marched away and lost their lives.
And when they called a special session to deal with it, the phone rang from the White House and Donald Trump called and said, I need five more congressional seats.
I need it gerrymandered even worse than it is.
And so they pushed all of that discussion they were going to have about all of that flooding and the horror that it had caused.
And they pulled out the maps.
They literally pulled out the maps the next day and they had them up there and they started redistricting for five more seats.
And the Democrats left the state and they stalled it as long as they could.
But the bottom line is they gerrymandered Texas again.
It's been gerrymandered for a long time in favor of it, but they gerrymandered it again for five more seats for Republicans.
And then they went back to the normal business that they said they were there to do.
How much influence does the president or leadership of their own parties have over them and how they react and vote on legislation, topics of the day, versus their constituents?
Well, let me separate the leadership with the president.
The president has as much influence related to how popular the president is at any given time.
You know, the president's very popular, Ronald Reagan, I think of the Reagan years and first four years, five years of the Reagan presidency, had an enormous amount of influence on both Democrats and Republicans.
People have to remember that during the entire time that President Reagan was president, he had a House of Representatives allegedly controlled by the Democrats.
But he still got his agenda passed, and that was in part because of his personal popularity.
Leadership, on the other hand, in the United States Congress has less influence than constituents do, unless it's one of those super big, major issues like the Affordable Care Act or taxes or something like that.
But most of the issues that people are contacting their lawmaker about aren't those major issues.
And members of Congress are free to support or oppose their constituent views.
Leadership doesn't really care whether or not you support more funding for Alzheimer's research or whether or not you're going to propose a bill that's going to change how the EPA regulates ponds on farms.
I mean, that's just not something leadership cares about.
And I will tell you, one other area where leaders are matter to members of Congress in voting is when a particular leader, let's say a committee chairman, is seen as a subject matter expert.
I remember looking at a member once and he would always look to this one particular Armed Services Committee chairman and ask his staff, how is he voting on this?
And that's where leadership, and it was not because of influence or power, it's because the lawmaker respected the chairman's views as an expert.
What about when you have a national debate and it's a tight vote in the House or the Senate and leadership is twisting arms behind the scenes?
And that lawmaker, especially from a swing district, is saying to themselves, I do not want the headline in my local paper to say, I saved X or whatever it is.
I was just curious, with all the gerrymandering going on, does it really matter for most of these Congress people what my opinion is?
I mean, I've got a Democratic congressman in my district, and I've called him once, and I felt like, you know, the people, the Democrats were actually rooting him on to not really pay attention or care about my concerns.
Well, I, like many Americans, am appalled by both what's happening in gerrymandering.
I think it's absolutely unconstitutional, to be honest with you, in my opinion.
I'm not an expert in gerrymandering, but when I see states like North Carolina or Virginia disenfranchise a significant portion of whether it's Democrats or Republicans, I'm just appalled by it.
And I don't think we should have it.
But again, no one's listening to me when it comes to that stuff.
Tony, I would say that, you know, and I do know you're a member of Congress.
I'm not going to mention who it is because I'm a Virginian and I'm in the district.
Now I'm in the district next to you.
They do listen.
They do pay attention.
Most members of Congress, when they get elected, feel that they represent all of their constituents, not just 50% plus one in a primary.
They really do have that both moral and political will to try to listen to you.
It doesn't mean they're going to do what you say.
You know, as I said, they factor a lot of different things into their decision-making process, but they do feel it's their responsibility to listen.