Every day on Capitol Hill, the phones ring inside legislators’ offices. Young staffers answer, and there’s usually a constituent on the other end expressing an opinion on the news of the day: the Kavanaugh confirmation, border security, government spending.
Phone calls to Congress are one of the main ways individual citizens can influence federal policy. Congressional offices keep tallies of support and opposition to pieces of legislation. Representatives use that information to gauge the sentiments of the folks back home.
By nearly all accounts, calls to Congress have risen since the 2016 election, as they often do in the initial years of a new presidency. Yet many of those calls are not merely organic expressions of a newly energized electorate. Rather, they are being engineered by interest groups. The practice, little-known outside of the Capitol, is known as “transfer calling” or “patch-through calling.” It involves specialized firms placing telemarketing calls in search of people who agree with their clients’ causes. When they find one, they connect that person to his or her representative to express what is meant to sound like an authentic and firmly held opinion.
The strategy has been around for years, and it is impossible to know how many calls to Congress are manufactured in this manner. What’s clear, though, is that interest groups are becoming increasingly sophisticated at making organized lobbying efforts appear to be spontaneous. It is an example of what is known as “astroturfing,” the practice of making an advocacy campaign look like a grassroots reaction (and so hiding the sponsor).
On February 8, just before 1 p.m., the phone rang at Douglas Carroll’s home in Mount Pleasant, N.C. On the line was a telemarketer. But she wasn’t selling anything. Instead she wanted to talk to Carroll, a 53-year-old executive at a medical device startup, about Internet privacy. “Deborah” said she was calling on behalf of the Center for Individual Freedom, and she wanted to know if she could connect Carroll to the office of his congressman, Richard Hudson.
“Are you willing to call Rep. Hudson and urge him to support a law to protect consumers online?” she asks on a recording of the phone call. “If you are, I can patch this call through, and you can leave a message with his office and let them know you support a consumer bill of rights to protect your online usage.”
The Center for Individual Freedom is based in Alexandria, Va., and identifies itself as a free-market advocacy organization. Early this year, as an alternative to net-neutrality legislation, telecom companies were pushing for a bill that would also place consumer restrictions on search engines and social-media companies. Hudson, a three-term Republican, sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. No bill ever emerged.
Carroll was appalled to learn that special-interest groups call people and then connect them to Congress. It creates a biased sample, he thinks, and distorts the public’s actual opinion. “It’s dangerous in my book,” he says. “It’s someone with an agenda that selects who they are going to connect to their congressman, and only the people who agree with their agenda get connected. It’s a scary thing if you think about how it could be used.” Hudson’s office and the Center for Individual Freedom did not reply to requests to comment for this article.
The recording of “Deborah” trying to connect Carroll to his congressman was made by the Jolly Roger Telephone Co., a paid service that deploys artificial intelligence to thwart telemarketers by wasting their time (bots give vague, preprogrammed responses to queries and so keep the calls going and going). The company was part of a January article in these pages about technological startups fighting telemarketing. Jolly Roger’s owner, Roger Anderson, says he identified 11 other calls to his customers originating from a Washington D.C. area code that wound up connected to congressional offices. The recordings document telemarketers’ conversations with the Jolly Roger voice bot and the subsequent confused conversations between the bot and a congressional staffer.
The advocacy groups in the recordings represent issues across the political spectrum. Callers identified themselves as affiliated with groups including the Environmental Defense Fund, which was seeking support for an Obama-era rule by the Bureau of Land Management regarding methane leaks; the Wilderness Society, which was opposing the Interior Department’s appropriations bill; New American Economy and the ACLU, supporting the so-called “dreamers” who came to the country illegally as children; Free Our Internet, which favors Internet privacy protections; and Fair Courts Now, opposing efforts by North Carolina Republican legislators to change how judges are selected in the state.
A spokesman for the Wilderness Society says, “Nothing we do is rocket science. But I confess that we do use the telephone as well as email, Twitter, Facebook, [and] the U.S. mail to inspire Americans to care for their public lands and protect them for future generations.” An ACLU spokeswoman says, “Our followers asked for ways to fight for immigrant youth, and calls to members of Congress is one of the tools we deploy to make it easier for activists to engage in our democracy.” The other groups did not respond to attempts to contact them.
Transfer calling is just one tactic groups use to apply pressure to legislators. Other strategies include forming issue-oriented front groups to drum up citizen interest, commissioning public-opinion polls, scripting op-eds or letters to the editor of local papers, and encouraging followers to weigh in on social media and with texts and emails. Phone calls can be more effective at influencing legislators, though, because it is harder to judge the authenticity of messages originating from newer technological platforms. In one well-publicized example, when the Federal Communications Commission last year solicited comments on its proposal to undo net-neutrality rules, it received millions of comments that were later determined to be either form letters or bot-written messages.
“There has been a long-term increase in efforts to gin up political mobilization,” says Matt Grossmann, a political science professor at Michigan State University who studies interest groups and influence. “The firms that do it are a little bit secretive, but there is enough in the public domain to show that there are firms that do this full-time that you can hire to try to stimulate grassroots support for your cause.”
Those efforts aren’t certain to succeed. A representative’s party and ideology tend to be far better predictors of voting patterns than public opinion, whether real or perceived. No amount of phone calls, for instance, would have flipped Republican support for tax cuts or persuaded Democrats who have supported abortion rights for decades to abandon that position. But deployed strategically, grassroots appeal on a position can have an effect, Grossmann says. It can make more of a difference if the support is overwhelmingly one-sided, if it is on an obscure issue, and if it connects with the interests of constituents. Often, those efforts are aimed at lower-profile committee votes or persuading a particular member of Congress to cosponsor a bill.
John Jameson offers a wide range of such services to clients. The president of the D.C. political-advocacy firm Winning Connections, he puts together campaigns of get-out-the-vote phone calls, digital ads, and social-media posts. If the client is trying to influence legislation, though, one of the most powerful tools Jameson pushes is patch-through calling.
“The phones are particularly effective because it’s difficult for people to do,” he says. “For 95 percent of voters, calling their legislator is an unnatural act. Elected officials pay attention if it’s a constituent who knows what she’s talking about.”
Winning Connections works primarily with progressive organizations and nonprofits to influence legislation. It also has an elections arm that focuses on Democratic politicians and ballot initiatives. The value of using phones to connect constituents to lawmakers, Jameson says, is “you can scale them. You can have dozens or hundreds or thousands of them calling in support.” Political calls are largely exempt from federal rules restricting telemarketing. His firm uses publicly available information, such as voter lists, to target people who might be sympathetic to a cause and willing to take action. But finding the right person can be a slog, sometimes requiring 25 or 30 calls to find someone who answers the phone, agrees with the message, and is comfortable articulating it to a congressional office.
Jameson says the calls provide “air cover” for clients whose lobbyists are conveying similar messages directly. He argues that while the call centers his company uses help guide constituents in what to say, there’s nothing fake about this means of communication with lawmakers: “We are mobilizing citizens to take more action.” He says his firm has done “some Kavanaugh work” and has helped increase federal funding for the National Institutes of Health, but most of the action nowadays is at the state level. The company’s website notes it used patch-through calling to beat back a West Virginia effort that would have required prescriptions for medicines that contain key ingredients used in making methamphetamines. It also credited patch-through calls for the success of an effort to expand Medicaid in Montana.
Other D.C.-based firms point to their state-level triumphs, too. Stones’ Phones touts its work helping to defeat a Texas bill that would have required people to use the restroom that aligns with the sex listed on their birth certificates—a measure opposed by transgender advocates. “Stones’ worked with our partners in Texas to deploy patch-through calls to successfully stop the bigoted and dangerous ‘bathroom bill,’ ” its website says. It claims the campaign reached nearly 300,000 Texans and transferred more than 21,000 calls to Texas lawmakers. The bill died in the state legislature last year.
The Stones’ Phones website also describes successful patch-through calling efforts to persuade Maryland legislators to approve a casino, prevent pension reform in Michigan, and kill right-to-work legislation in Ohio. The company did not return calls asking for comment.
American Directions Group bills itself on the website of the American Association of Political Consultants as “one of the largest and most experienced research and advocacy firms in the country” in large part because of its network of U.S.-based call centers. “If a legislator gets a call,” the company claims, “chances are ADG patched it through.” ADG’s chief marketing officer said in an email that the company does not speak to the media.
Lawmakers and their staffs tend to be receptive to hearing what constituents think, and patch-through calls exploit that openness. In a 2017 survey of congressional staff members, 94 percent said in-person visits from constituents could be influential in persuading a lawmaker on issues where no firm decision had been reached. Other effective strategies were individualized email messages (92 percent said they were influential), individualized postal letters (88 percent), and phone calls (84 percent).
The interns and young staffers who answer the phones on Capitol Hill are often aware when they are targeted in patch-through campaigns. Sometimes they can hear the telemarketer on the line connecting the call. Or they notice the volume of calls spiking on certain issues and hear the same talking points over and over. Occasionally, the constituent on the line will admit that an interest group told him or her what to say. One staffer remembered a constituent saying, “Somebody called me and told me to tell you not to pass tax cuts, but I actually like tax cuts.”
In other cases, staffers recall callers who seemed baffled about why they were talking to a congressional office. “It’s pretty comical sometimes,” says Scott Blakeman, who worked as a legislative assistant for Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) for four years. “You’d just be polite, courteous: ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I think you may have the wrong number, maybe? This is the congressman’s office. Did you have a question?’ And they’d be like, ‘I’m sorry, no.’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, have a nice day.’ So you kind of figure it out after a little bit.”
Many legislators and citizens believe the existing system of interactions between constituents and lawmakers is broken. Communications have turned uncivil and even ugly. “When I have a caller who tells a young staffer in my office who does case work that he hopes she is raped and impregnated, we have really reached a new low,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), a key vote on the Kavanaugh confirmation, told the Bangor Daily News in September month. Her office has received threatening letters about the nomination and more than 3,000 wire coat hangers, a reference to illegal abortions.
Bradford Fitch, president of the Congressional Management Foundation, which works with advocacy groups on civic engagement, says controlled forums such as call-in town halls are more likely to produce positive interactions between legislators and their constituents. “The current situation of bombarding Capitol Hill with hundreds of calls and emails is not conducive to a healthy democracy,” he says. “Members of Congress can’t separate the signal from the noise. Constituents don’t feel their voices are being heard. The members are not communicating effectively with constituents. There’s fault on both sides.”
But in Washington the debates remain fierce, and interest groups and constituents want to weigh in. The phones will keep ringing.
