The week before the November 2024 US elections was like so many that came before at Winning Connections, with John Jameson (MBA 1991) padding around his firm’s Capitol Hill town house in athletic shorts, trying to demonstrate that the telephone still has a role to play in politics.

There were the 200,000 calls to Colorado to persuade voters to back an election-reform initiative on the ballot, and a much smaller effort to remind Detroiters to return their completed ballots. Text messages had been dispatched to give Pennsylvanians the details of a campaign miniscandal that would soon fade from memory. Since founding Winning Connections in 1997, Jameson has been a pioneer in politicking over telephone lines. It’s work that has made the firm one of the political industry’s leading consultancies, generating $15 million in annual revenue and an office shelf crowded with its top awards. One by one, though, the innovations that seemed to open up new ways of reaching voters by phone lost their effectiveness—falling victim to caller ID, do-not-call lists, and voter exhaustion with once-novel tactics like robocalls and candidate text messages.

Jameson knew things would get easier once Congress came back into session in January 2025. Voters may no longer feel they have to answer calls from strangers, but government offices surely do, and on Capitol Hill, nonstop ringing phones direct lawmakers’ focus to constituent opinions in a way that a full email inbox never could. The consultancy’s primary product is no longer outbound calls to voters but rather inbound calls known as “patch-throughs,” which connect constituents directly to lawmakers. This pivot over the past decade has reinvigorated Jameson’s firm and restored his belief in a communications medium he’d worried was facing obsolescence. It has also placed Jameson in the midst of some of the era’s most vexing legislative conflicts—from regulating artificial intelligence to funding Ukraine’s war against Russia—as he revolutionizes the business of lobbying Congress in an era defined by gridlock.

The first time Jameson encountered a political phone vendor was in 1983. He was 26 years old at the time, serving as deputy campaign manager for a gubernatorial candidate in his native Mississippi. A Washington-based consultant came down to pitch the campaign on his phone services. He could set up call centers in Mississippi’s five largest cities and help the campaign call 100,000 voters.

By the time Jameson founded Winning Connections 14 years later, much had changed. Congress had deregulated long-distance calling, making it possible for a vendor to inexpensively reach voters anywhere in the country without having to establish a physical footprint nearby. A political industry that had been largely focused on communicating via broadcast and direct mail ballooned with phone vendors.

Jameson, too, had changed. After serving as southern coordinator of Al Gore’s first presidential campaign in 1988, he enrolled at HBS. Upon graduation, Jameson went to work at American Mobile Satellite Corporation as it competed for the nascent mobile-phone market. When he returned to politics, he did so with an entrepreneurial mindset at odds with the typical sensibility of Washington’s consulting class, given that former campaign managers tend to make spending decisions based on political incentives rather than economic logic.

“They get this mentality that if the other side’s spending money on TV, we’ve got to match that,” Jameson says. “What they don’t understand is, once the bathtub is full, you can’t fill it up. You can pour more water into it, but it just doesn’t matter.” Jameson focused on using newly available data about individual voters to predict who would be likeliest to respond to a call, but not merely because it would help his clients win. The best way to cut costs and grow his margins, Jameson realized, was to have fewer operators dialing wrong numbers or being hung up on.

That business was focused entirely on helping candidates, parties, and outside groups during election season, until a moment around 2000 when a client asked if Jameson could do patch-through calls. “I said yes, and I’m glad the question was not, ‘Have you done … ?’” he recalls with a laugh. “And so we kind of figured it out.” For years, those angling to influence the legislative process were eager to have lawmakers hear directly from their constituents. But doing so was not easy. So-called fly-in days, in which lobbyists would bring interested citizens from around the country to Washington for face-to-face meetings, were thought to be highly effective but had to be planned far in advance and were costly. Online petitions and email form letters were easily discounted as artificial expressions of voter concern.

“The one constant we’ve always had is the phone. The phone is more disruptive, and gets more attention because it’s ringing in the office, right?” observes Kimberly Robson of the Save the Children Action Network, a longtime Winning Connections client. “We always joke that our goal is to shut down the phone lines.”

Getting voters to place those calls was a struggle, however. Lobbyists could blanket the public with messages to “call your member of Congress” but would have to hope those citizens knew their representatives’ names. A well-funded campaign could rent a toll-free 800 number and advertise for like-minded citizens to call it, ensuring that they were correctly directed to the right congressional office. But unless they rang during Capitol Hill’s business hours, they would never reach a live staffer.

The patch-through call solved those problems. Data analysts could identify those individuals in key districts most likely to respond and then call them during congressional working hours. An operator could offer to patch a voter through after providing some tested talking points. And the firm that engineered the connection could count exactly how many constituents it had helped to deliver to their representatives.

“It’s an investment of a person’s individual self,” says Sam Sokol, a Washington-based public-affairs consultant. “Calling up, giving their name, giving where they live, telling their representative to ‘cosponsor this’ or ‘please fight against this.’ ”

Jameson now sells such services at about $18 per call to a lawmaker’s office. They keep the firm occupied in odd-numbered years, defying the traditional boom-and-bust cycle faced by campaign operatives. The work has also given Jameson—a committed Democrat who, like most political consultants, does not work for the opposite party—access to nonpartisan clients like corporations (helping Airbnb fend off local regulations) and charitable nonprofits (bolstering the American Cancer Society’s efforts to ban menthol cigarettes).

“We would bring to John only issues that I think we can explain in three sentences and that have meaning to real people,” says Sokol, whose entertainment-industry clients have hired Jameson to help pass legislation regulating the use of artificial intelligence for deepfakes. “You need an issue people can understand and talk about in their own voice,” Sokol adds.

In 2022, Jameson joined the land-mine clearing nonprofit HALO Trust as a global ambassador, and the next year, for his first overseas assignment, he traveled deep into southern Ukraine, about 18 months after Russia’s ground invasion. “Unless fields like the ones I visited in Mykolaiv are demined, Ukraine will go from being the world’s breadbasket to a basket case,” Jameson wrote in The Hill upon his return.

Jameson was approached shortly thereafter to host a fundraiser for the Ukrainian-American advocacy organization Razom, whose leadership was taken by more than just Jameson’s skill as a host. “We were impressed with him as a human. I don’t know any other American who goes to Mykolaiv, which is a place that’s heavily shelled, on their first trip to Ukraine,” says Melinda Haring, a senior advisor at Razom. “So we knew he was special, and he understood the importance of this fight now.”

Haring and a colleague invited Jameson to lunch to express their thanks and agonized over the predicament in which they found themselves in the winter of 2023. A military funding bill that Kyiv considered essential had stalled. Congressional Republicans were split on the worthiness of the Ukrainian cause, and House Speaker Mike Johnson was unlikely to let the bill come to a vote without clear support from his caucus.

“We couldn’t make things move,” says Haring. “And we thought we had considered all the different linchpins in a campaign, and we hadn’t even thought of calls.”

Jameson had a case study at the ready. In 2015, he had been approached by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as it sought to rally congressional opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. Over a nine-week period, the Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran campaign connected over 500,000 constituents to their lawmakers. The $9 million contract still represents the largest patch-through program Jameson has run. Even though it proved unable to deliver the supermajority necessary to derail the deal, it demonstrated to Jameson that operators could quickly convert citizens into lobbyists on a complex foreign-policy issue.

Razom handed Jameson its “whip list” of lawmakers seen as ambivalent about the merits of aggressively backing Ukraine. He turned it into a patch-through program that would target 58 members and had his data analysts identify voters who could be motivated to call them. They used two criteria to select 1.2 million targets across the districts: vote history (to find active citizens most likely to take action) and age (older people are more likely to be available during the daytime).

“I’m not asking for money, just your help stopping Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” an operator would say upon reaching a voter on the phone. “Do you think Congress should do more to help Ukraine?”

It took an average of more than 35 outbound dials to find one citizen willing to be connected. But over the course of a crucial two-week period in April 2023, Winning Connections delivered 33,100 calls to Capitol Hill—that’s 600 or more constituent calls to every targeted member’s office.

Razom lobbyists also used one-on-one meetings to address members’ specific concerns, while television ads aimed to move public opinion. Retired diplomats and military generals were recruited to lend their credibility in interviews and op-eds. But the most important message one can send to an indecisive politician is that he or she will face a more difficult reelection by voting the wrong way.

“We try to create this echo chamber where every way they turn, or from every source, it’s all pushing the process in the direction of getting to yes and passing the bill,” says Razom’s government-affairs director, Scott Cullinane. “The patch-through calls demonstrate that there is that constituent interest in the district.”

On April 20, 2024, the bill came for a vote and passed—with the support of 34 of the 58 once-wavering Republicans. Jameson suggested one addition to the program: 400 calls to Speaker Johnson’s office to thank him for bringing it to the floor. It was, Jameson knew, the best way to let the new speaker know that the people who had sent him from Shreveport, Louisiana, to Washington, DC, backed his move.

“We’ve learned the power of phones,” says Jameson. “It’s the power of conversation.”

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