Utah News Dispatch
Utahns love to call their members of Congress — now they may dial state lawmakers more often
5 Calls, a website and app that helps users contact their representatives and senators in Congress, is expanding to include members of the Utah statehouse. (Photo by Jacques Julien/Getty Images)
An online platform encouraging constituents across the country to make direct contact with their federal elected officials is ready to go local, starting in one of its best-performing states — Utah.
5 Calls, a website and app that finds users’ representatives and senators in Congress and provides them with a phone number and a script to discuss some of the hottest issues on Capitol Hill, is now expanding to include members of the Utah statehouse in partnership with Elevate PAC.
On the list of federal issues, platform users in the state may now notice items with a red banner, marking state-wide issues.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
One is titled “Investigate the Senate President’s Abuse of Power,” referring to reports of Utah Senate President Stuart Adams initiating legislation that later helped a family member reach a plea deal in a criminal case. Another one reads “Respect the Court, Respect the Voters: Don’t Appeal Utah’s Fair Maps Ruling,” about the legal fight happening in the state over congressional maps.
“Utah’s a really interesting state for us, actually. It has really consistently, at the federal level, been in the top three states in terms of calls made to Congress per capita,” Nick O’Neill, technical director of 5 Calls said.
For privacy reasons the organization doesn’t collect information about constituents who make calls via the platform. But, O’Neill imagines, one of the reasons Utahns are so engaged is because Republican lawmakers in the state “could sort of stand on their own, have an opinion of their own, and that’s a really interesting and unique feature in today’s political landscape.”
There’s no concrete information on users’ demographics in the state. The only existing data about engagement in Utah is on the volume of calls and the most popular issues among users.
In Utah, constituents reported over 2,280 calls in the last seven days, counting national hot buttons. The No. 1 issue recorded in the platform was a demand to release the Epstein case files. The second, was a call to impeach Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Our community has been asking for state-level tools for years. Utah was the clear choice to launch, not just because people here are already using 5 Calls at such high levels, but because there is so much potential to shape the state’s future,” Rebecca Kaufman, executive director of 5 Calls, said in a statement.
During the first couple of weeks of featuring local issues, Utahns have registered over 620 calls for state concerns, O’Neill said. The experience has also been different with state lawmakers, as many personally answer their phone calls, as opposed to delegating calls to a staffer.
In the partnership, Elevate PAC will bring on-the-ground perspective and explainers to help select issues that matter the most to Utahns, said Jackie Morgan, senior partner of the group. The goal, she said, is to see more contact between legislators and their constituents to inform decisions with more perspectives from their districts.
“We see so often in Utah, state lawmakers don’t listen to their constituents. We see committee hearings that are full of hundreds of people, and then the votes go exactly how we’d expect them to go,” Morgan said about the Utah Legislature’s Republican supermajority.
And overall, Morgan said, the platform represents an opportunity for people in the state who may feel powerless to take political action, even without having lobbyists on payroll.
“Instead of doomscrolling and getting frustrated and feeling powerless, you can actually do something about it,” she said. “We have had so many people reach out to us and say that they’ve contacted their representatives, and they’ve been shocked because their representative has just actually answered the phone.”
Most issues listed on the platform are progressive-leaning, O’Neill acknowledged. However, he emphasized 5 Calls is non-partisan and selects issues that are popular among the public regardless of political affiliation.
The platform has been testing the new system in other red states, like Texas, which just wrapped up a special legislative session that changed electoral boundaries, and Ohio, where lawmakers have to redraw congressional maps before the end of the year.
“We have been prioritizing important issues in states where they’ve come up. And I think it’s just happened that there have been a number of Republican legislature-controlled states that have started moving towards these sort of intentional gerrymanders,” O’Neill said, “which is what has come up as we’ve been able to have the technology to support this.”
