December 1, 2022
In May 2013, outgoing Senator Olympia Stowe [R, ME] appeared on “The Daily Show” with John Stewart. Part of the exchange was:
JOHN STEWART: So [Senator Pat] Toomey [R, PA] and [Senator Joe] Manchin [D, WV], these guys get together…and they get together and they do a bi-partisan background check amendment, they said they’ve got 70 senators lined up. The NRA says they’re going to score it that drops to 54 [senators]. 54 is still a majority but gets defeated because of the silliness of the filibuster rule.
OLYMPIA STOWE. 90% of the American people supported that initiative…10% opposed it. Is the 10% louder than the 90%? That’s the problem. We all gotta speak up. …Calling members of Congress making sure they hear from those 90%. …You’ve gotta make sure so that you can reinforce those voices and back them up.
JOHN STEWART: A system of representative government that has 90% support for an issue, and 70 senators that would do it if not for one lobby group’s objections…shouldn’t have to call people to get that done, that is a broken system.
Maybe it’s not a broken system, more likely a system being used well by a few with lots of people sitting on the sidelines willing to not understand what they need to do to participate in that system, is what is really going on?
John Stewart did a disservice, or missed an important opportunity, to point out that being heard is important in politics. He, instead, decided to jump to the aspirational, the what-ought-to-be, as though that matters in politics. Well, OK, it has a place but needs to be tempered with pragmatism and Stewart missed the moment.
If, in looking at a Pew Research Center poll from 2015, before the Trump Presidency, before the pandemic, it was noted that just 19% trusted the government always or most of time, which was the lowest it had been in more than fifty years, that encourages less people to speak up and increases the voice of a very small minority to be heard out of proportion to their numbers. Admittedly, trust in government went up a bit so that by 2021 it reached 24%, but the long-term trend is not good. The more the level of trust in government stays low, whatever the percentage is, the more a very vocal minority is heard and can have an outsized influence on politicians.
Since trust in government is not necessarily going to see any increase to the 60%-70% range of the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson years, then how are vast numbers of Americans who are quietly sitting on the sidelines going to be persuaded to have their voices heard?
One suggestion is through sermons in churches, synagogues, and mosques: Ministers, priests, rabbis, perhaps imams simply talk about political participation as more than voting. Talk about just the small step of having those out there in the pews find an issue that they feel matters to them and just have them think about sending a short, coherent, grammatically correct email to a city council member, a state legislature, a member of Congress. The idea is to avoid thinking of big sweeping changes but small steps. Politics as the small, politics as just an activity, not even suggesting what to be for or against.
For too many people politics is about the grand design, thinking big, not thinking small—and the small is needed.
Throwing up one's hands with the customary look or attitude of despair as though nothing can be done, just living with fatalism, can be countered.
It is inevitable if emails are sent that form-letter responses are most likely going to come back to them from those they contact. I contacted the White House, never done that ever. I complained that the Bidens needed to get off their duffs and head to rural America. They both need to go without prepared remarks but just talk normal and listen, and they would be probably screamed at, and certainly they would be attacked by Fox News, News Max, and One America News Network. So what? Well, I got back the customary form-letter as I expected (OK in email format). Part of what sermons need to stress is the likely form letter/email responses.
Many people just don’t know where to start. The drumbeat to register to vote and vote drowns out what to do between elections. What happens between elections matters and that civic duty moment of voting and going home, takes away too much from what more is needed. That other aspect of political participation, emailing an elected official, should be less time consuming that the act of voting. If absentee ballots are severely curtailed and waiting in lines to vote become longer, emailing an elected official is easy to do. The basics are to have some knowledge about your issue and write coherently: Coherence is important. A former state senator told me that he tried reading emails and letters he received from constituents, but he had trouble understanding what they were saying because their emails and letters were so poorly written (often with misspelling, bad grammar, writing that tried to pass as sentences). There were emails he received he could coherently understand, but, unfortunately, there were many he received that simply made no sense.
The power to counteract the National Rifle Association (NRA) exists, John Stewart had a lost opportunity to address it. The NRA is successful at grassroots lobbying. As one individual put it:
[T]he average NRA member is more likely to be active, whether at a rally for legislation (or against legislation) that they don’t like, than their opponents.
Bloomberg-backed ‘Everytown’ and ‘Million Moms Against Guns’ simply don’t have people who are passionate about the cause. It’s the cause de Celebre every once in a while, but most of the time they’re spending a lot of money just to get a few people out.
One writer who addressed a House of Representatives push to ban assault weapons and have mandatory background checks stated:
The NRA’s grassroots clout – via the internet, letters, phone and other tools – coupled with the influence wielded by millions of other gun owners, keep many Republican allies fighting almost reflexively against gun curbs, notwithstanding recent NRA problems including electoral setbacks, staff cuts, drops in member dues revenue and legal threats.
Former Senator Stowe’s comment about the power of the 10% can be countered but it’s the 90% that gave them power and influence by sitting on the sidelines.
Added to High School Civics Lessons and University Political Science Courses—Writing to Elected Officials
“Civics” might be an older term rather than using “politics” or “government,” but it might apply—particularly at the high school level. A political scientist sent out 142 emails to political parties and presidential candidates, while the U.S. was included, six additional western democracies were also included in the emails he sent: one in five emails received a response within one business day. That may sound like a poor response rate, but one communications consultant stated:
Essentially, in most offices on both the House and the Senate side, there is some process for logging communication that comes in from constituents. When we’re talking about email or online petition signatures, it’s hard to weed out who is an actual person in their district.
Sending an email is totally fine. Just do your best to make sure the email doesn’t read or sound like a form letter. And make sure you say you’re a constituent. If I was going to write a letter to my congressman, I would include some detail about my neighborhood. … If you’re writing in because you care about tax rates — why? What does it mean for your family, what does it mean for your business?
Notes
Marielle Hawkes, “Writing to an Elected Official,” Beyond the Ballot (February 27, 2018): https://medium.com/beyond-the-ballot/writing-to-an-elected-official-134065dad6d8
Austin Lewis, “How has the NRA successfully used grassroots lobbying?” Quora (no date): https://www.quora.com/How-has-the-NRA-successfully-used-grassroots-lobbying
John Light, “Do Politicians Read the Emails You Send Them?” BillMoyers.com (December 26, 2012): https://billmoyers.com/2012/12/26/do-politicians-read-the-emails-you-send-them/
“Public Trust in Government: 1958-2022,” Pew Research Center (June 6, 2022): https//www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust-in-government-1958-2022/
“Suggestions in writing to elected officials,” University of Nebraska Medical Center (no date): https://www.unmc.edu/govtrelations/_documents/writing-elected-officials.pdf
Peter Stone, “NRA’s grassroots clout still formidable with Republicans despite legal setbacks,” The Guardian (April 1, 2021): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/01/nra-grassroots-clout-republicans
“Tips on Writing to Your Elected Officials,” ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/other/tips-writing-your-elected-officials
Joshua Tucker, “Most emails to parties and candidates across Western democracies go unanswered,” Monkey Cage (December 4, 2012): https://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/most-emails-to-parties-and-candidates-across-western-democracies-go-unanswered/
“Writing Letters to Elected Officials,” Community Tool Box (no date: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/advocacy/direct-action/letters-to-elected-officials/main