Why Voters Don’t Get What We Want from Our Representatives.

Julie Hotard
4 min readNov 18, 2020

Democratic voters often don’t get what we want from our government officials. Why? The most important reason is: Most of us don’t let them know what we want.

If we don’t let Democratic officials know what we want, what they do is believe the results of poorly designed focus groups and polls that seem to be constructed in order to deliver a particular outcome. Most Democrats are not very technology savvy or social media savvy. They’re also not good at research on messaging or elections — as we see from their having lost a lot of seats in Congress in November and not having gotten control of any new state legislatures.

That’s not all the fault of the Democratic politicians or leaders. Republicans have a vast super well funded infrastructure to help them with media, messaging, vetting judges and many other tasks. Democrats have very little of this kind of support. That needs to change. Liberal donors can help.

Open Letter to Liberal Donors: Please Consider Donating to Create Missing Liberal Institutions

https://upine.medium.com/open-letter-to-mackenzie-scott-laurene-powell-jobs-and-other-liberal-donors-please-consider-43e32433c545

The poorly designed polls and focus groups Democrats do seem to always conclude that 1) Democratic voters want Democratic officials to passively defer to corrupt GOP officials & to seldom confront them or investigate them or point out how they are trying to destroy democracy and 2) Democratic voters want Democratic candidates to focus on “kitchen table” issues — rather than on saving democracy, voting rights etc.

That’s what Democratic Congress members think you want — at least if their actions and statements are any indication. So if that’s not what you want, please join me in sending them letters and emails and faxes and phoning their offices.

A lot of people complain to their friends. A lot of Democratic voters complain to each other on social media. A lot of people tweet their desires to Senators, House of Representatives members or other political officials — so many, in fact, that I would be surprised if those political officials had time to read all those tweets. They probably don’t.

People who work with Congress members tell me that handwritten snail mail letters get the most attention because they’re so rare. So I may try that too. Right now, I am emailing them using the contact forms on their web sites and phoning their offices.

Here is the contact form I just used to contact Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris.

Below is the email I sent. Please feel free to write her, plus your own representatives and Senators, plus Speaker of the House Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer, about these or any civic issues about which you are concerned.

Dear Vice President-Elect Harris

I am very concerned about the Senate elections in Jan. in GA. Please connect with politicians you know in GA & ask them to ask voters there to request absentee ballots now for the Jan. election. Then they need to fill them out & insert them in certified drop boxes — not in the mail.

Electronic voting machines and ballot marking devices can be hacked and are not safe. Here is an article from New York Review of books about that. Also, ask any computer programmer you know. Fraudulently programming the machines or hacking them is easy. And it can’t be detected because the software is proprietary — secret — by law. And the main voting machine company is a GOP donor.

Also, as you are aware, DeJoy was appointed by Trump to destroy USPS. Although DeJoy claims there were only small numbers of ballots left undelivered by the Nov. 3rd election day, why would anyone believe a Trump donor & appointee who threw out sorting machines & slowed mail intentionally? He could easily “lose” thousands of ballots from Blue voting zip codes & lie about it.

Please do this & get the Senate. You know that if you don’t get the Senate, you & Joe will have your hands tied & be blocked from enacting liberal legislation & Joe won’t be able to appoint liberal appointees. So you & Joe could be stuck having only acting heads of agencies — or worse, having the centrist or Right Wing appointees whom McConnell will approve. But they will help the GOP, not the people. They’ll be like Obama appointing Comey & then Comey’s letter cauing Hillary Clinton’s loss.

That was horrendous. We don’t need anything like that happening again.

If you don’t understand that the GOP is full of con artists, please read books like Babiak’s Snakes in Suits, Konnikova’s The Confidence Game, The Sociopath at the Breakfast Table & The Sociopath Next Door. Please have your staff & everyone in the House & Senate read them too. You have to be careful with con artists. You can’t “compromise” with them because their idea of compromise is: Dems get nothing. GOP gets everything they want.

Thank you.

Julie H. Hotard, Ph. D., psychologist
Blog at

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