Content of my emails to state and United States reps: “Hello. It’s me, a political wallflower who now identifies strongly as your constituent. Speaking for myself, my friends, my family, and random folks I know who work for the federal government and report literally throwing up in meetings and not sleeping for days and being tormented by decisions like, ‘Should I take the dubious buyout money or follow through on moves and house purchases and try to save the nation from within even though I’ll have no job security, or just drop out of the workforce altogether and raise chickens that will likely die from bird flu?’: Fuck.”
And also, “Hey what’s the plan? I saw a bunch of protest fliers while doomscrolling Reddit. One of them is sending me to a parking lot next to a local Chinese buffet on Tuesday. Should I go?”
And also, “My fed contact told me that all FBI field offices have been ordered to prioritize immigrant deportation over preventing domestic terrorism. Is that true?”
And also, “Deploy me in your resistance. Personally I have nothing to offer you by way of valuable skills or political capital. But please deploy me. Didn’t I send you $25 once?”
Send messages. Refresh inbox. Refresh inbox. Refresh inbox. Plan follow-up emails, not understanding why my reps don’t immediately take advantage of this direct channel I’ve created after a lifetime of zero interaction.
If I wanted to be more strategic about it, there are probably levers I could pull, names I could drop in these emails so a staffer would flag them to a higher echelon of inbox. Unknown authors are rarely plucked from the slush pile. They need literary agents to introduce them to publishing houses, so editors know their books are worth reading. (Contributing to my perception that today’s literary world can resemble a multi-level marketing scheme, where uplines only sponsor you if you buy their books, and inevitably there will be more recruiters than readers.)
I’m sure LLMs are busy sorting political inboxes all over America into positive and negative sentiment, summarizing and categorizing the content of each email. And I’m probably being sorted into the Time-wasting Constituent bucket because my writing never says anything an LLM would find useful, especially when it’s giving sad, scared, and/or desperate.
All I can hope is that one day, years from now, an artificial intelligence will pull a verbatim from one of my emails. And it will wind up on a multi-tabbed spreadsheet used by a political marketing research team. And an actual human eyeball will be scanning the rows and columns, and it will pause briefly on a cell containing my biggest insight from 2025 – “Fuck.” – before moving on to more actionable formulas, functions, and dollar signs.
Katrina E. Callsen
DelKCallsen@house.virginia.gov
Mark L. Warner
https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contactpage
Tim Kaine
https://www.kaine.senate.gov/contact/share-your-opinion
R. Creigh Deeds
senatordeeds@senate.virginia.gov
John McGuire
https://mcguire.house.gov/address_authentication?form=/contact/email-me
Copied from social media:
FOR THOSE OF YOU LOOKING TO TURN YOUR despair INTO ACTION, here’s some advice from a high-level staffer for a Senator.
There are two things that we should be doing all the time right now. You should NOT be bothering with online petitions or emailing.
1) The best thing you can do to be heard and get your congressperson to pay attention is to have face-to-face time — if they have town halls, go to them. Go to their local offices. If you’re in DC, try to find a way to go to an event of theirs. Go to the “mobile offices” that their staff hold periodically (all these times are located on each congressperson’s website). When you go, ask questions. A lot of them. And push for answers. The louder and more vocal and present you can be at those the better.
2) But those in-person events don’t happen every day. So, the absolute most important thing that people should be doing every day is calling.
YOU SHOULD MAKE 6 CALLS A DAY:
2 each (DC office and your local office) to your 2 Senators & your 1 Representative.
The staffer was very clear that any sort of online contact basically gets immediately ignored, and letters pretty much get thrown in the trash (unless you have a particularly strong emotional story — but even then it’s not worth the time it took you to craft that letter).
Calls are what all the congresspeople pay attention to. Every single day, the Senior Staff and the Senator get a report of the 3 most-called-about topics for that day at each of their offices (in DC and local offices), and exactly how many people said what about each of those topics. They’re also sorted by zip code and area code. She said that Republican callers generally outnumber Democrat callers 4-1, and when it’s a particular issue that single-issue-voters pay attention to (like gun control, or planned parenthood funding, etc…), it’s often closer to 11-1, and that’s recently pushed Republican congressmen on the fence to vote with the Republicans. In the last 8 years, Republicans have called, and Democrats haven’t.
So, when you call:
A) When calling the DC office, ask for the Staff member in charge of whatever you’re calling about (“Hi, I’d like to speak with the staffer in charge of Healthcare, please”) — local offices won’t always have specific ones, but they might. If you get transferred to that person, awesome. If you don’t, that’s ok — ask for that person’s name, and then just keep talking to whoever answered the phone. Don’t leave a message (unless the office doesn’t pick up at all — then you can — but it’s better to talk to the staffer who first answered than leave a message for the specific staffer in charge of your topic).
Give them your zip code. They won’t always ask for it, but make sure you give it to them, so they can mark it down. Extra points if you live in a zip code that traditionally votes for them, since they’ll want to make sure they get/keep your vote.
C) If you can make it personal, make it personal. “I voted for you in the last election and I’m worried/happy/whatever” or “I’m a teacher, and I am appalled by ——-,” or “as a single mother” or “as a white, middle class woman,” or whatever.
D) Pick 1-2 specific things per day to focus on. Don’t rattle off everything you’re concerned about — they’re figuring out what 1-2 topics to mark you down for on their lists. So, focus on 1-2 per day. Ideally something that will be voted on/taken up in the next few days, but it doesn’t really matter — even if there’s not a vote coming up in the next week, call anyway. It’s important that they just keep getting calls.
E) Be clear on what you want — “I’m disappointed that the Senator…” or “I want to thank the Senator for their vote on… ” or “I want the Senator to know that voting in _____ way is the wrong decision for our state because… ” Don’t leave any ambiguity.
F) They may get to know your voice/get sick of you — it doesn’t matter. The people answering the phones generally turn over every 6 weeks anyway, so even if they’re really sick of you, they’ll be gone in 6 weeks.
From experience since the election: If you hate being on the phone & feel awkward (which is a lot of people) don’t worry about it — there are a bunch of scripts (Indivisible has some, there are lots of others floating around these day). After a few days of calling, it starts to feel a lot more natural.
Put the 6 numbers in your phone (all under P – Politician.) An example is McCaskill MO, Politician McCaskill DC, Politician Blunt MO, etc., which makes it really easy to click down the list each day.
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