No, the legislator's not gonna read your letter. Letters definitely result in a +/- report of the sort you describe. Maaaybe the legislator will read a few letters, but it's highly unlikely yours will be one of them.
Thinking it's a "long shot" that a staffer will influence their legislator, while at the same time considering seriously the possibility that a letter will do so, is backwards in the extreme. Letters are inert pieces of paper. Staffers are people the legislator talks to every day, and who do all the work to formulate the legislator's policy. They're the people who do the research, find the facts, book the meetings, communicate with staffers in other offices, write language for legislation (well, except for the all-to-frequent case where corporations or lobbyists submit language and it gets copied in verbatim), and so on. If staffers can't influence the legislator, nobody can.
Letters are a long shot when compared to phone calls.
Edit: I should reiterate what I said above: this varies by office. Probably there are some exceptions, where the average impact of a letter may be closer to the average impact of a phone call.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2011-12-24 16:54 (UTC)Thinking it's a "long shot" that a staffer will influence their legislator, while at the same time considering seriously the possibility that a letter will do so, is backwards in the extreme. Letters are inert pieces of paper. Staffers are people the legislator talks to every day, and who do all the work to formulate the legislator's policy. They're the people who do the research, find the facts, book the meetings, communicate with staffers in other offices, write language for legislation (well, except for the all-to-frequent case where corporations or lobbyists submit language and it gets copied in verbatim), and so on. If staffers can't influence the legislator, nobody can.
Letters are a long shot when compared to phone calls.
Edit: I should reiterate what I said above: this varies by office. Probably there are some exceptions, where the average impact of a letter may be closer to the average impact of a phone call.