Democratic challengers complain that Republican incumbents don’t hold town halls. Do these meetings matter?

Across Virginia, and probably across the country, the congressional campaigns share certain similarities.

Democrats are attacking Republicans for high prices, backing the H.R. 1 bill that they say endangers rural hospitals, and what they deem to be “corruption.”

Republicans are counterattacking that Democrats are, well, Democrats, who, if elected, will support higher taxes, more federal regulation and “crazy” social issues.

Reality check: Some of these issues that Democrats are hitting Republicans on are now beyond the reach of Congress (the economy, for instance, where Iran seems to have more power than the U.S. president to set the price of oil) and the things that Republicans are hitting Democrats on won’t actually become law as long as there’s a Republican president to veto them.

There is one other issue that Democrats consistently raise, and it’s completely within the purview of every member of Congress: They fault Republican House members for not holding town halls.

This has been a particularly persistent theme for Beth Macy and Joy Powers, the Democratic candidates challenging Republican incumbents Ben Cline and Morgan Griffith in the 6th and 9th districts, respectively. Both have been holding their own town hall meetings and calling attention to the fact that the incumbents haven’t been. Both have frequently accused the Republicans of “hiding” from the people they represent.

Of all Powers’ social media posts, the one that has gotten the most comments is this one: “Trivia question: How many years has it been since Congressman Morgan Griffith stood in a room with his constituents and answered their questions?”

In Macy’s case, she often brings along a cardboard cut-out of Cline to put on stage with her. After a recent such town hall in Botetourt County devoted to the topic of data centers, she posted on social media: “We even had an appearance from ‘Flat Ben,’ who NEVER holds town halls for his constituents!”

This brings us to the key question: Does it matter?

The Democratic candidates obviously think so, but do voters? We have no way to measure that, other than to count the votes on Nov. 3. Until then, though, we can explore the questions that orbit around the town hall theme. Namely, are town halls the best way for elected officials to gather feedback from their constituents? Are these particular House members isolated from their constituents? Why have town halls seemingly vanished?

Some of these questions are easier to answer than others, but let’s give them a go — in reverse order.

Town halls haven’t gone away. Republican town halls have.

The website LegiStorm has tracked the number of town halls members of Congress hold each year. Until 2022, the national average was 2,685. If you divide that over 435 House members and 100 senators, that’s an average of five a year for each member of Congress. Then, starting in 2023, town halls went into sharp decline — with just 1,018 in 2024.

Their numbers have rebounded since — but with a distinct change in who has been holding them. In the past, LegiStorm says the majority party in the House typically held the most town halls, the minority party the least. That held true regardless of which party was in the majority or the minority. What’s unusual now is that it’s the minority party — Democrats — that are holding the most.

Last year, LegiStorm counted 2,219 town halls — 1,484 by Democrats, 726 by Republicans. Through the first half of this year, the disparity was even more pronounced — 451 by Democrats, just 39 by Republicans.

Town halls have become more raucous

Video from Rep. Dan Rostonkowki’s infamous encounter with angry voters in 1989.

Why the change? Part of the answer can be traced back to Donald Trump, and the intense (and, according to polls, unpopular) reaction to his second term. In spring 2025, some Republican House members saw town halls backfire on them. MS NOW reports: “Several GOP town halls went viral as constituents and activists protested policies of the Trump administration, putting lawmakers on defense in front of cameras. Voter criticism spanned several topics, from rising costs to Medicaid cuts in the GOP’s reconciliation bill. Even the Jeffrey Epstein files were a major flashpoint.” In response, MS NOW reports, the House Republican leadership “encouraged lawmakers to avoid in-person town halls and opt for virtual gatherings.”

That may be too convenient an answer, though. The nature of town halls has been changing over the years, long before Trump rode down the golden elevator. One tipping point came in 1989, when a crowd of senior citizens in Chicago confronted Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Illinois, then the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, the panel that deals with tax budgets. This technically wasn’t a town hall meeting, although it’s often remembered that way. Rostenkowski had been meeting privately with advocacy groups representing senior citizens to talk about a controversial new Medicare law. When he emerged from the meeting, about 100 “angry” people confronted him, “jeered” him and “briefly blocked his car from leaving,” according to a Washington Post account at the time.

The fury at an entrenched congressman startled many, and the tone of politics began to change through the 1990s and early 2000s. Some town halls began to look less like the ones Norman Rockwell portrayed in his paintings of small New England towns and more like heckling sessions. The Trump era has coarsened public discourse all around. I remember attending one in Moneta 2017 — the first year of Trump’s presidency — by then-Rep. Tom Garrett, R-Buckingham County. Protesters were lined up outside, and police had to escort away at least one attendee who insisted on shouting out of turn. Then-Rep. Dave Brat, R-Hanover County, told The Hill in 2017 that he’d been booed at one town hall when he said that rights came from God. “They booed God. They booed the pastor. They booed the prayer. They booed the name of the church. They booed when I said rights come from God,” Brat said at the time. “That’s a fundamental tenet of Western civilization. I mean, I didn’t think that was partisan.”

If town halls have gone away, one reason is simply the behavior of some of the attendees. We’ve seen this same descent into chaos at other public events. At one time the Labor Day speech-making in Buena Vista was a respectful affair where candidates from both parties got to have their say; in the past few years, it’s been impossible to hear the speakers because of so much heckling. This year that changed, after the mayor admonished people to behave themselves. You can make the philosophical case that members of Congress should have the spine to listen to voters shout at them, although there is also a practical side. When MS NOW reported on the decline of Republican town halls, it quoted Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-New Jersey, who said the frequent disruptions meant that town halls are now “completely nonfunctional and noninformational.”

Republicans have gravitated to tele-town halls

These are events where the congressional office calls multiple phone numbers and patches them into a large-scale conference call.

The upside for voters: You don’t have to leave your home.

The downside for voters: You never know if you’re going to get called (I’ve gotten called two or three times over the years) and, if you’re concerned about a particular issue, you can’t organize those who feel the same way to present a united front.

The upside for officeholders: Random people tend to be more respectful than those who organize themselves and show up to protest something. You can also reach more people.

The downside for officeholders: There really isn’t any, unless you think there’s some actual value to an in-person meeting. And, of course, there’s the risk that you get accused of not holding town halls.

The Republicans who hold tele-town halls say they are better because they allow for more participation. “For example, in a recent hourlong tele-town hall, we had thousands of people who were on the call and more than 200 people remained at the end of the call,” Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, said in an emailed statement. The criticism is, in the words of MS NOW, these telephonic events “give members more control over who gets called on, how questions are asked and how confrontational the exchange becomes.”

Are House members who don’t hold town halls out of touch?

I’ll pass on this one because voters will answer this soon enough. That seems the only objective measure. However, the question does raise another question: Are those who attend town halls representative of the general public? If there aren’t town halls, we have no way of knowing, do we?

A related question is whether incumbents are inaccessible. That’s more quantifiable. Their social media accounts document plenty of occasions where they are appearing in public, although you can argue that’s not the same thing as standing before a group of people and taking questions. For what it’s worth, one Sunday evening earlier this year I made a shopping run to the Kroger grocery store in Daleville and, lo, there was Cline pushing a shopping cart with a list in hand. But he’s not holding town halls to meet with the protesters who gather weekly outside his Roanoke office.

Do town halls matter?

That’s the key question, isn’t it? We have no reliable polling data on this, so in one way, we really don’t know. My guess — which will be unpopular with Democrats this year — is they don’t. Here’s what I base this on:

First, political parties have access to polling data the general public doesn’t. If Republicans saw data that told them the lack of town halls was a deal-breaker with enough voters, they’d figure out a way to hold them and endure whatever shouting they had to endure.

Second, if town halls were so important, more people would have attended them when they were more widely available. Town halls are very important to civic activists who want to have people show up en masse and make a particular point, but most people aren’t civic activists. They just want to live their lives, and their lives don’t revolve around civic participation.

If town halls matter to voters, I suspect they matter more as an idea than a reality: Voters might like to feel that their House member is accessible even if they have never attended one of his or her town halls. However, I suspect what voters care most about is whether their representative truly represents their views. Which of these candidates best does that? We’ll find out Nov. 3.

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