You Should Know

The real power of the NRA is their membership is mostly reliable voters.

It also helps if you have a very specific and narrow cause .. muh guns rights .. and anti or pro specific legislation. This creates broad consensus.. that follows the NRA draft talking points they usually bring out.

Less than you would think, but it also depends on how you contact them. A physical call is way more powerful than an email. 10 people passionate enough to call can easily translate to 1k people passionate enough to vote about it.

It's highly variable, and yes I absolutely agree money in politics is a big problem. I do have a direct experience where reaching out to my Senators led to them aggressively and successfully opposing a provision in a law that would have had a big impact on me. Don't want to dox myself, but this real change to a bill made a huge difference to me and many others. So it is possible to make an impact.

They actually do care believe it or not. When our city council was voting on municipal fiber we showed up to petition our conservative city council representative to vote in favor. Guess who also attended, a representative from our federal senator’s office. Oh man the look on his face when only 3 members of the public showed up, two of them major supporters of municipal broadband, and the third spoke up to agree with us. Mmmm priceless. The city council man and conservative rep were so damn flustered. The senator’s rep took notes the whole time and we got to talk to him one on one. These outreach events do way more than you would think, this is how they gauge what they can get away with. Don’t let them discourage you, show up and bitch!

A self-fulfilling prophecy if his constituents don't try to make him care

If anything that makes it more important. We already know how essentially all the Democrats are going to vote. A couple of Republican defections is all it takes to hold the Senate.

The key here is they don’t have to defect on everything. Turning every Republican senator into a never Trumper isn’t happening. But making some of them defect some of the time is a lot more feasible, and requires constant pressure.

This is exactly why the OP exists! My state has been solid blue for a decade now. I trust my senators not to vote to confirm AG Gaetz, but they NEED a few Republicans to join them. It looks like Collins and Murkowski have come out against him. We need a few more, and OP is saying that calling is one of the few things that may influence them. Certainly more likely than bitching on Lemmy.

The one tradeoff to having Democrats representing me in Congress (both house district and Senate) is that I don't have anyone to call over stuff like this because they're already on my side... Although for some reason my governor (who has been awesome otherwise) has been praising RFK for HHS, so maybe I'll need to call his office and my senators about that one. Anyway, PLEASE don't fall into the opposite trap and give his office a call!

They don't have to take away your power if you stop yourself from using it first. Don't willingly give up your voice.

I've tried nothing and it hasn't worked. I'm all out of ideas.

These tactics are not always a guarantee to have things go your way, but they increase the chances. For phone calling, numbers of people calling in matter the most, particularly at strategic times, including: right after big announcements, right before a committee vote, right before a floor vote. It's also more effective before dominant narratives have arisen around a topic and there is uncertainty on how things could shake out.

Yeah — pretty much this. Most people answering phones are interns. They’re given instructions to listen and be non-confrontational. They also won’t tell you what the congressperson’s view on the matter is. Ultimately, they have no power and just try to summarize what you said and put it in a computer program with your address so the office can mail you a letter from the Congressperson about the issue. These letters are generic to the topic you called about and generally try to say nothing controversial.

On rare occasions for really contentious issues, I saw them split the topic buckets into pro and con and send letters for each depending on whether you were for or against the thing you called about.

Mostly, I didn’t get the impression that Congress people pay much attention to phone calls. If the issue is contentious enough to divide the caller pool into pro/con, they might check a tally of the totals in each pool. But, for 99% of topics, they just send you a generic letter.

Also, a lot of these letters are full of bs. Congress people will often propose nice sounding bill names or cosponsor others that they can cite in these letters as evidence that they care. However, 99% of these bills go no where and often the congresspeople don’t even want them to. You’re upset about airplane noise over your city? “Well, I agree, that’s why I cosponsored the airplane noise reduction act.” Meanwhile, if that bill ever picked up steam the airline lobby would crush it and your congressperson would help them.

So, I don’t call my congressperson because I don’t really get the sense that it makes a difference. One thing I did see make a difference though was lobbyists. You see, they live right in Washington DC and rather than call, they schedule meetings with the actual paid staff or congressperson, not interns. They go right in their office and sit down and have a long chat. And, the staff have a big incentive to listen to them.

Most congressional staff are paid peanuts. They try to live off $25-45k/year in an expensive city and have 2 or 3 roommates. Some of them are often overqualified, holding law degrees and masters in their interest areas. So, once they get some experience and burn out of this life of poverty, guess who is happy to scoop them up? Yep, they go running right into the arms of those lobbyists and gladly take that $200k salary to go about fighting insulin price caps or defeating environmental regulations. It doesn’t even matter if they came into Washington, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ready to take on these big corporate interests. By the time they’re 3-4 years in, realize they’re sick of eating ramen noodles, and the easiest way out is to call up some of those lobbyists and ask for a job, they do it. Oh you have a masters in agricultural policy with a specialization in organic farming? McDonald’s federal affairs office will hire you. I’ve seen it happen.

Do not call a congressperson that isn’t your own. They are not required to listen to you, you are not their constituent.

Unless they happen to be chairing a committee that you have an opinion on.

Then it's fair game.

Counterpoint: call them anyway. Gum up the works. Change the mind of their interns. Send enough letters that it becomes a waste disposal problem.

Be annoying and difficult and make them work for every inch.

But also be nice. The interns are people too.

Awesome!

Totally agree it's important to engage all levels of government. But only the US Senate has the authority over nominations

Have you tried calling their phones? Sure some don't pick up, but enough do.

I'm in favor of larger structural changes, but I'm not about to roll over and allow fascists to get everything they want in the current system. How many people do you expect to join a revolution if they won't even be bothered to pick up a phone?