Background

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland is one of the safest members in Congress. He won reelection in 2006 with 82.6% of the vote. Instead of campaigning and fundraising last fall for his own campaign, Hoyer traveled the country raising money and speaking on behalf of vulnerable Freshmen Democrats and promising Democratic challengers.

He had very little time to court voters in his own district. Hoyer took nothing for granted, and decided to reach out to as many of his supporters as possible in one broad stroke. It was important to reassure them that the Congressman had them in mind, even when he was three time zones away.

Despite Hoyer’s comfortable standing in the polls and demanding travel schedule out of the District, he insisted on “campaigning”. With this in mind, we planned two telephone town hall meetings to leverage his time—he could discuss a range of issues with thousands of voters from the comfort of his campaign headquarters.The first event went as scheduled. Yet the plans for the second were interrupted by House Leadership meeting and some “emergency campaigning” in a hotly contested open seat. Since the call was already announced to his constituents, Hoyer could not cancel. But he didn’t have enough time between the Leadership meeting and his flight to travel to his headquarters and back. At the last minute, we set up the program at our office on Capitol Hill. Majority Leader Hoyer traveled just two blocks from his meeting at the Capitol to our office. Within minutes of walking in the door he was handed a phone with over 1,000 constituents on the line.

The telephone town halls enabled the Majority Leader to reach out to over 20,000 constituents, and over 2,000 Marylanders joined in the forums. Majority Leader Hoyer was reelected with 73.6% of the vote. More important, he was able to continue to log another dozen trips and multiple fundraisers for targeted candidates and helped to pick up another 21 House seats for the Democrats in the 2008 elections.