Connection/Communication
Dr. Annelise Russell on the Modern Landscape for Constituent Comms
Thank you all for the warm welcome last week! I’m so excited about what we’re going to cover here at Voice/Mail. My personal inbox is very open and will not be overwhelmed by input if you have thoughts and feedback.
Today is our very first interview! And what a wonderful place to start, digging into both the mechanics of how Member offices reach constituents, and the history and incentives shaping this modern landscape.
Dr. Annelise Russell is a political scientist at the University of Kentucky and former journalist studying how Members of Congress communicate with their constituents. When I was thinking about starting this newsletter, Dr. Russell was one of my first calls. Her work on Congressional communications, Member messaging, and modern political rhetoric is a window into parts of constituent engagement that are just invisible from the outside, and is based in a real empathy for the people within the system trying to hold it all together with limited resources.
In this conversation, we cover:
The modern Congressional office toolkit, and the evolution of “paid media”
How offices layer multiple methods of engagement to reach constituents
The impetus for engagement in “official” (i.e., elected, not campaign) offices
How innovation in outreach methods filters from the campaign to the “official” side
The value to constituents in Member office communication
Why comms and constituent outreach are so hard to study
I will say that this is a very Congress-focused conversation — and a lot of this newsletter will use Congress as a case study, but a lot of the challenges Congress faces in engaging with constituents are only exaggerated at other levels of government, with even fewer resources.
Anne: This was not on my script, but I did want to ask: So a while ago, you had a tweet that really made me laugh, saying that the six most dangerous words in your profession are “Lawmakers use Twitter for constituent communication.”
Annelise: Yes.
Anne: So as we were framing what we’re focusing on for this newsletter, we got some pushback from people on including communications (comms) in constituent engagement. So before we start, can you validate my choices?
Annelise: Yes, yes. So, that’s right, in the sense that comms is a giant umbrella, and comms has multiple audiences, and comms has multiple tools, each tool targets different audiences. Some tools in a lawmaker’s toolbox are constituent-oriented — as they should be, that’s the foundation of representation — but some tools are less constituent-oriented and more oriented towards other audiences, like journalists, or like modernization nerds who really like to know what's going on in Congress.
So Twitter is great. It can be a useful tool when used in the right ways. But the notion that Twitter itself is a mechanism for reaching constituents requires us to either A) change what we mean by constituents, or B) think a little bit closer about the choices that we are making.
Anne: That makes so much sense.
So when our team was planning our interviews with Congressional office staff on the future of constituent engagement, thinking about that big umbrella of tools offices are using to talk to their constituents, I reached out to you to see what we were missing, and you filled in maybe a dozen tools that just weren't on our radar at all. Paid media, digital advertising, all that. So can you talk about how the paid media world, proactive outreach, those other digital methods fit into the modern engagement toolbox for Congress?
Annelise: Yeah. So the way I break it down is you've got owned media, earned media, and paid media, right?
Earned media are what we think of when we think of journalists: hits on MSNBC, CNN, etc.
Owned media are socials: your Instagram accounts, your tweets, things like that.
Then paid media, which in a lot of ways may sound pejorative, but we might as well just call it constituent media, because most of what you're paying for is to get in front of specific audiences of constituents through any number of tools — whether that’s vis-a-vis phones like teletown halls, or phone surveys, or through mail, or even through like digital advertising or [Cable TV] or YouTube. All of those can go to lots of different audiences, primarily because they're paid, but they can't go to anyone not in their geographically defined constituency. So constituents are inherently part of these comms strategies, and offices devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to paying for constituent connection and constituent communication.
Anne: Which is — correct me if I'm wrong here — something that really goes unnoticed in the landscape of people who think about Congress or who work on advocacy for Congress, because these methods are genuinely invisible unless you're a constituent getting that material, right?
Annelise: That’s right. So paid comms — which essentially is franked comms, right? — has always been in existence (outside of a small window in the 1800s) in some form or fashion. Its most recent big developments came in the 1970s, when people were like, “maybe we should have some more regulations about this — we can't just rely on the Postal Service to figure out this mail thing.” There have been other reforms over time: people used to have separate accounts outside of their budgets for this, so in the 90’s, a lot of taxpayer unions saw paid comms to constituents as government run amok. They were like, “You're spending all of this money just to tell us what you're doing, it's just an in-kind [donation], it's just campaigning — why should we allow people to do this?” And there's still some of that, but we've moved away from a lot of that [feeling], particularly when we live in a world where there are regular disasters and constituents actually need to know where to go to get assistance, or we need them to know where to show up for a town hall, things like that. So it sort of evolved to where it is now.
Anne: Something you've really focused on in your work is how the digital stuff and the paid stuff interact, for example, as you said, around a town hall telling constituents where to show up in person. Can you talk a little bit about how offices layer those different types of engagement?
Annelise: Yeah. So every office does it to some extent, and some offices are better than others, right? Ideally, in a perfect world, you would have an overarching strategy where all of the pieces fit together. The reality is that doesn't always come together — just because the average Congressional office has (at least on the House side) one person, maybe two if you're lucky, and you're asking what is often a 26- or 27-year-old to manage all of this. Even as someone ten years older than that, I can't wrap my head around how you manage all of it.
But it's layered in a lot of ways. Inevitably, your Member is going to have priorities, and a lot of what you can do is promoting those priorities. If you have a bill that you've cosponsored, or if you've got something going on, you'll think, “okay now, what are all the tools that we have to communicate that?” You've got things that you can do easily, like a press release, and you might do a Twitter announcement. You might also do something on Facebook where you advertise, or maybe you just write a post and then you put dollars behind it to boost that advertisement so that people know what you're doing.
If you've got something coming up on the floor that you want constituents to know about — yes, you do news hits back home. But also you may do a text message at the beginning of the week to say, “Hey, this is what's up on the floor this week, how would you vote on this?” And then at the end of the week, saying, “Look, hey, I heard you. This is what I'm doing. This is what I did. Or we lost this one, but here are three things I'm doing on this topic.” So that's this dialogue that I think offices ideally would like to have, where every piece builds on one another, and you can layer these different tools and do a lot of — for lack of a better word — cross promotion.
Does that always happen? No, because a lot of what you're also doing is reacting. But what we saw in LA is a good example of some offices that were able to do this right, where you're reacting but getting information out. You're doing a bunch of news hits; you're doing paid comms; you're posting as much as you can on things like Twitter and Facebook — because you want constituents to know what they need to be able to A) save their lives, or B) figure out how to recoup what has been lost. So in those moments, those are good examples of when members can really step up and layer those tools in a way that is beneficial to constituents.
Anne: Hearing about the whole spectrum of those tools, it’s striking to me that so many of these are new, some of these have really only come into widespread use in Congress in the last — under a decade? Maybe?
Annelise: Yeah, no, usually I would say at this point about fifteen years — depending on how we break down all of the tools.
We've always had some form of earned media. It looks different now with partisan media, more broadcast, less newspaper, more industry than ever before, less local, right? The landscape looks different, but that's sort of a more consistent piece.
All of the social media, we really don't have much before 2008. We think about Obama's presidency as marking the ability to use social media and text messaging, but that doesn't really kick off in Congress until towards the end of Obama's first term. It's not until 2013 that you have every senator on Twitter for the first time. In the scheme of things, this is a fairly slow roll. Now we have the new world of X, where it's different but we're not quite sure how different yet.
But the new thing is — Nancy Pelosi was the first one up on YouTube, but now we have folks advertising there, because that's where people are getting their news now. These things are extremely new. The notion of paying money to go on Disney Plus or Hulu for advertising? Well, that just didn't exist five years ago.
Even advertising on Facebook or putting money behind posts —it’s been here for a decade, but it's changed quite a bit. What you might have paid $1 for on Facebook eight years ago is going to cost you $8 now. It's just a very different dynamic, a very different and changing digital landscape.
So I think you're right to say that it's changed a lot, and even the things that have been here for ten years — they're still in constant flux.
And again, to remind you: that is the constant flux that one person is in charge of managing.
Anne: So what's the pipeline for this new tech coming into Congress? You mentioned the campaign — it seems like some of this is driven from the campaign side, then that eventually filters to the official side. Is that the pipeline? Are there other pathways in for new tech and tools?
Annelise: I think so. A lot of what we have to keep in mind with Members of Congress is they are both competitive and insecure at the same time. Some of it is, “We did this on the campaign, let's keep doing this.” You’ve got a lot of money, you can try a lot of things on a campaign — but what you got is what you got in Congress, so there's less “let's give it a whirl.” But there's also a lot of, “Well, that one person tried that — why can't we do that?” There's a lot of follow-the-leader in trying out new things. So campaigns are one place it comes from.
But also, technology evolves, and Congress slowly, very slowly, adapts with it — not necessarily in an efficient way. The notion that Congress is now embracing YouTube ads when we've been watching YouTube ads for twelve years is like, “Okay, thank you for coming to the party.”
But it's hard for Congressional offices to wrap their head around, like, “why should we be paying $10,000 a month to run YouTube ads when we've been able to send tweets and do Facebook for free for years, and that's where our audience was?” It's hard for an office to say, “Okay, our audience has changed, how we do this is changing, and we have to change along with it,” in addition to all the technology that comes along with that.
Anne: And just to be really clear, because I think a lot of people don't necessarily grasp the difference between the campaign side and the official side — what is that rationale for Members of Congress on the official side to be getting that message out? What's the impetus for paying for those YouTube ads and spending all of this money on reaching constituents there?
Annelise: I think [that impetus] has increased over time. There's a lot of ways that we can talk about this, but one thing that has emerged out of digital and social media is an expectation for authenticity that we have with lawmakers that we really never expected before.
I ask my students all the time — raise your hand if you can tell me which state AOC represents, and every single one of them, regardless of their political affiliation or if they know anything else, they can tell me she's from New York. Fifty, forty, years ago, that would just be unheard of. So it's a function of how we've developed increased personality and authenticity that I think a lot of these platforms feed and allow for.
Also, our world is a lot more complex than it was forty years ago. Where we get information is a lot more varied. Like trying to explain to my students in this generation what the five o'clock news is and what the value is of being at five o'clock — it's just not their reality in how they consume information.
But getting information from lawmakers, from government — some of this information is like adult civics education about what's going on in your community, what can they do to help you? Most people embrace that as a vital tool. I mean, sure, there are some people that will say, this is campaigning, you can call it whatever you want but that it is campaigning. And there are lots of aspects of it that, yes, 100% you could argue — but there is a trade off that at the same time, we need to inform people.
One of my favorite things to read back on is in — I believe it was a debate in the 80s that they were having about franked mail. I can't remember if it was Don Young from Alaska at the time, but someone from Alaska was defending the need for mail, because they're like, “There is no way else that my constituents in Alaska will get this information.” And things have changed, but it is still Alaska, right? So it's this defense of like [Congress] should be one of the ways in which people know what's going on with their government. And it is part of the role of a lawmaker to make sure my constituents are informed. I mean, to run for Congress, you have to believe that you add some value to your district, and I think most people see that as a core tenet of their value in representing their constituents.
Anne: So part of the depth of your expertise here is that you've just spent so much time in deep one-on-one conversations with folks who are doing this, with that poor 26-year-old comms staffer who's trying to do all of the things. What's the vibe for comms folks on the Hill these days?
Annelise: So I will say that I haven't talked to anyone thus far in the 119th Congress. But we learned a lot of lessons during the first Trump presidency, right? Everyone was on Twitter. I don't think anyone really grasped the fast pace. It caught a lot of people off guard. A lot of people burned out. With the nature of staff turnover being what it is, I think there's going to be a lot of lesson-learning again this first 100 days. On both sides, you're reacting to what the Administration's doing, particularly early on, and that's tough. Regardless of what party you're in, [executive orders are] going to change something for your constituents at some point, and you’re figuring out what that means. I think post-January 6, the vibes are less good just because there's that added PTSD, if you will, in that experience.
I think if you still ask most people, though, there's a reason that they're there, and they like their jobs, right? There are people that have been there for thirty, forty, years — not usually in comms — but there have been people who are there long term. But it is a real struggle, because comms is a 24-hour experience. Should it be? No. I mean, that's not sustainable. You can get in the shower, miss a call, and twenty minutes later, something's been reported without comment from your boss. So it is a hard life. I have immense respect for anyone who does that job, because so much about what you do has very little to do with your own voice, and it is all about channeling the voice of someone else. That, in and of itself, is a Herculean task for someone, and then to manage all of those different tools is also, you know, more than I think an office is equipped to manage. That's why I often refer to it as a crisis of communication, because it's just there's more to do than what they actually have the capacity to do. And that's why a lot of offices will rely on outside vendors or internal or external support to manage all of this, because otherwise — you just can't.
Anne: To put an even finer point on that internal/external support point: I think one thing that hasn't really come up for us yet is the role of parties in putting a thumb on the scale for how individual Members message. Can you speak a little bit to that? Are Members getting pressure from their party to message on something at all times? Can they push back? How does that work?
Annelise: Yeah, so parties certainly play an agenda setting role, right? They want to provide you with things that are helpful. Now, are those things always helpful? Not necessarily. But you also have to keep in mind for example that the Democratic party is trying to come up with messaging for, on average, 200 plus members that range from like a D-plus-60 district to a D plus-0.06. That's a huge margin. Things that invoke MAGA are going to work for some folks really well, and others are going to just fall by the wayside. Things that lean into pro-life rhetoric are going to work really well for some Republicans, and then other Republicans have to be a lot more careful with the rhetoric or even the topics that they choose to speak about.
So I think they're more successful at some things rather than others. I think parties can be really successful at coordinating resources and opportunities, particularly on the Senate side. Most senators are like “Yeah, thanks, bye” on messaging guidance, but they would love the resources that the Senate Democratic Media Center can provide: opportunities to go on radio, or lining up production and booking — things like that.
But it's also resources, training, support that can be really useful, that we don't think about. My favorite example is two years ago now, but the House Democrats put together an Easter or a Passover graphic that people could use, and there were over forty or fifty Democratic offices that used it on Twitter. This is lowhanging fruit. For an office, it’s like “Thank you for this graphic, we’re moving on.” That kind of stuff that you don't think about, but it takes time.
Anne: Even just giving that staffer back the twenty minutes it would take to do a similar graphic on Canva — like that makes a difference.
Annelise: Who would have thought, “Oh, yeah, Canva is going to become part of my life.” Lots of Canva.
Anne: Incredible.
Annelise: Well, they realized that Adobe was too expensive — the caucus was bringing people in to teach them how to do Adobe, but their offices weren't buying it because they couldn't afford it. So it was this great disconnect of like, “Thank you for these skills that I can't actually use, because we can't afford to do this.”
Anne: That must have been an awkward conversation with leadership… But thinking about just your work: you're a tenured professor at the University of Kentucky in political science, but your work seems so different sometimes from what we hear from the rest of political science about the nitty gritty of how Congress works. So without asking you to answer for the Academy, what do you wish people understood more about how comms and how constituent engagement really works in Congress today?
Annelise: Well, the first step is convincing people that comms matters, right? I feel like that's a hill we've mostly climbed, particularly in the last ten years. When it comes to comms, traditionally, from the academic side, we thought about it on a campaign side, and we thought about how the public was receiving it. We thought about things like websites, and we thought about press releases, but we hadn't really thought about it as an important, integral tool for how Members of Congress work.
Part of that's just a function of data: we have so much legislative data that we could go through — votes, bills, all of that good stuff — which is great, but comms is a little bit slower. Now with digital, we have more data, right? But then paid comms, we have even less data. But I’m like, yeah people, it's been here forever. It's really important. It crosses over departments, it's this key thing, hundreds of thousands of dollars — but we know a whole lot less about it, because academia is still very concerned with the lawmaking of it all. But I think it's impossible to understand the lawmaking if you don't understand any of the internal dynamics that support that.
When I give this like my spiel to my colleagues, I always say, like, even if you don't care about Twitter, even if you have no interest in what's happening on TikTok, or what ads are going up — if the other side of the room is on fire, I have no idea how you do your job as like a legislative staffer or an admin staffer, if that's if that's the reality. All of this shapes the culture. It shapes what constituents know, and it shapes the reputation of a Member, which is crucial to things like reelection and their ability to impact policy. So I think I feel like I'm always coming to the defense of comms, but we've made inroads in convincing people that it’s not just ephemera, and it's not just the bows on top of the sustenance, right? It's part of the ingredients of what makes a Congressional office tick.
Thank you so much to Annelise for joining us! You should go follow her on X.
We have so many great interviews lined up for the next few months, but if you have any ideas of who we should be talking to — send them my way!
Annelise Russell, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Kentucky. She is also a faculty associate of the US Policy Agendas Project and a member of the Comparative Agendas Project. Dr. Russell’s research interests include questions about how policymakers communicate their agendas and the role of the media, particularly social media, in the political process. Much of her research is on Congressional decision-making and communication, including an active research agenda in the intersection of social media and political institutions. Dr. Russell publishes research across political science, public policy and communication, including in American Politics Research and Policy Studies Journal. Much of her interest in political communication stems from her work as a journalist working for the National Journal, Congressional Quarterly, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Dr. Russell received a PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin, and she also holds bachelor’s degrees in political science and journalism from the University of Oklahoma.