Connecting to Congress Organizes First Bipartisan Virtual Town Hall Meeting on COVID-19 Held in U.S.
Screenshot from bipartisan online town hall with Rep. Kendra Horn (D-OK), Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt (R) and other guests Apr. 14.
A Democratic congresswoman and Republican mayor in Oklahoma held the first virtual online town hall meeting in the nation on Tuesday, April 14. The two-hour interactive session featured Congresswoman Kendra Horn (D-OK), Oklahoma Mayor David Holt (R-OK), and Oklahoma City County Health Department Executive Director Dr. Patrick McGough.
More than 7,000 Oklahomans listened to the session through phones or viewed online, which was moderated by the Connecting to Congress (C2C) research team and Oklahoma City news anchor Kelly Ogle. Online surveys conducted with participants indicated the session made constituents feel they were better equipped to slow the spread of the virus, and virtually all expressed a willingness to share the information learned with friends and family.
This deliberative online town hall, organized by C2C in collaboration with the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF), was the first-ever bipartisan town hall on COVID-19, according to the town hall platform, Broadnet. It was also the first bipartisan town hall C2C has organized, but C2C senior researcher Dr. Michael Neblo believes that in emergency situations such as COVID, where widespread cooperation from constituents is required, a bipartisan, deliberative approach from leaders is uniquely valuable.
“Political science research suggests that when leaders from both parties are willing to communicate together in a consistent, candid way about what needs to happen, constituents notice and typically cooperate,” said Dr. Neblo. “Since people complying with public health measures like social distancing is the most effective action for flattening the curve on COVID-19, bipartisan events like these can really have a dramatic impact, especially with people who may not have a lot of trust in our elected leaders generally,” he said.
Our longtime collaborator, CMF President and CEO Brad Fitch, agrees. “We supported this bipartisan effort because we know from public health experts that communications expertise in a public health crisis is as important as laboratory analysis. Now more than ever, Congress must work collaboratively and utilize modern citizen engagement tools to enhance public understanding of the implications of this crisis and the issues facing the nation,” he said.
Our team is doing the full data analysis right now to determine how much the event changed participants’ opinions and behavior, but the early polls conducted within the town hall itself were very promising.
86% of respondents said they now had a better understanding of how they can contribute to slowing the spread of COVID-19.
96% of participants said they would be willing to share what they have heard in the event with friends or family?
In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, C2C has decided to re-focus its efforts away from new research and towards simply making the expertise and capacity our team already has available to as many Members of Congress as possible. We have come up with a rapid response plan for COVID deliberative online town halls that includes recruiting a representative sample of constituents, providing registrants factual background materials, handling all technology and moderation of the town hall, and providing scientific analysis afterward, which we are offering to any Member of Congress who would like to participate, at no cost to offices, on a first-come, first-serve basis as long as our capacity allows. We believe that these bipartisan deliberative online town halls such as this one or the one we have scheduled Thursday with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. John Katko (R-NY) are particularly effective for addressing the COVID-19 emergency, but we are also organizing deliberative online town halls for individual Members of Congress, such as the one we did for Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL) last week. If your office is interested in collaborating with C2C on either a single Member or bipartisan COVID deliberative online town hall, please get in touch.
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For more information about deliberative online town halls and their results for Members of Congress, please click here, or see Dr. Neblo’s testimony before the Select Committee for the Modernization of Congress. The full documentation of the research underlying the C2C initiative was published in a book, Politics With the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy in 2018.