Town Hall with/without Michael McCaul
On February 23, TX-10 Indivisible held a town hall meeting and invited TX District 10 Representative Michael McCaul to attend. Although Rep. McCaul was a no-show, 517 of his constituents — including me — did show up.
The “TX-10 Indivisible Town Hall with(out) McCaul” was impressively well organized and well attended, with constituents from Austin and more rural parts of McCaul’s gerrymandered district crowding into a large hall at Central Austin’s Congregation Beth Israel. The event was also livestreamed via Facebook.
Although McCaul failed to show up at that event, he did hold what the Austin American-Statesman called a “low-risk” telephone town hall on March 8.
Since the April congressional recess is coming up, and Texans from across the Lone Star State are trying to coax their bashful representatives to meet with them face-to-face, I thought it might be fun to create a few graphics comparing and contrasting a real live town hall meeting with a “telephone town hall.”
Here’s a bar chart showing a few numerical points of comparison.*
The percentage of time his constituents were allowed to speak in the telephone town hall versus the percentage of time that Representative McCaul held forth is best represented by a pie chart.
I’m not sure what kind of pie this is, but I’m pretty sure it’s NOT humble pie!
Of course, there are some things that do not translate well to a graphic. For instance, how to show the form McCaul assumed in each town hall?
In one he appeared as an enlarged color photograph propped on a chair, while in the other he assumed the form of a Wizard of Oz–like disembodied voice.
“Do you presume to criticize the Great Oz? You ungrateful creatures. Think yourselves lucky that I’m giving you an audience!”
So if you are a Texan trying to get an audience with your great and powerful representative in D.C., we welcome you to use these handy charts to show him or her why appearing in person to meet with constituents is probably a better choice than either
a. not showing up when your constituents hold a town hall for you
b. broadcasting your voice from behind a curtain….
*I wanted to include the ratio of constituents present who were able to ask a question (1 in 19 in the TX-10 town hall versus 1 in 5000 in the telephone town hall) but that threw the scale of the chart way off!
