An Empty Chair Town Hall in Charlottesville, Virginia

How small-city activists made a big splash while pushing their Republican representative to be accountable. You can too.

By Kristin Layng Szakos and Dan Doernberg

Virginia’s Representative from CD-5, John McGuire, is a member of the DOGE Caucus and one of the more extreme voices in Congress. When McGuire indicated he did not plan to hold in-person town halls in the district, Charlottesville activists planned a town hall anyway, to be held with or without him. The April 26 event accomplished several goals, including giving constituents a chance to voice concerns at a large public event, producing a written and audio record of harms done to constituents by MAGA policies, giving the roughly 600 participants ideas for future action, and generating publicity for their dissatisfaction with McGuire’s representation.

Charlottesville is a small city in central Virginia with fewer than 50,000 residents, a bright blue dot in a very red, rural district. The city’s Congressional rep, ultra-conservative John McGuire, has never held a town hall here. We found this unacceptable (as well as cowardly); our representatives are supposed to serve and meet with their constituents, not just the ones who agree with them.

For two months, a small group of Charlottesville area activists, most of us members of Indivisible Charlottesville, met in weekly Zoom meetings and in Signal chat conversations. We planned a town hall meeting, imagining and planning for every eventuality.

Building a crowd: Charlottesville has a history of activism, so we wanted to make sure we could accommodate a big crowd. We chose the largest venue available in town: the public high school’s performing arts center that seats 1,300. Using Eventbrite to distribute free tickets to the event had two big advantages: (1) it let us collect attendees’ contact data without creating a logjam to enter the auditorium, and (2) it let us make most tickets (1,000) available for online pre-orders while leaving 300 tickets available first-come first-served at the door (we didn’t want to shut out those who were not necessarily fast or savvy Internet users).

Lesson learned: Account for No-Shows. We ended up with several hundred empty seats. If we were doing it again, we’d assume at least a 30% no-show rate from free ticket reservations, and plan to “oversell” the event.

Ensuring a safe event: Charlottesville is no stranger to white supremacist violence and intimidation, most memorably in 2017, so we had concerns about a town hall open to everyone, but we decided that, to be a true Congressional town hall, it was important to give all constituents an equal chance to be heard, so admission was open to everyone. The organizing team debated pros and cons of a police presence. Some argued that police would make the event safer, while others felt strongly that police on site could make people of color and others reluctant to speak freely, and could potentially escalate conflict. We elected to have no police presence, and instead had 12 Indivisible marshals inside and 2 outside (all with de-escalation training) and numerous ushers around the auditorium.

Preparing the attendees: We used the Eventbrite “comment” feature to prompt folks to start thinking about what they would like to say to Rep. McGuire. As attendees entered the building, we gave each a 4” x 6” index card and a golf pencil, encouraging attendees to write comments, whether or not they planned to speak publicly. Those who wanted Rep. McGuire to reply to their cards were encouraged to include contact information. By the time the program began, participants were prepared to articulate their own questions, comments, and testimonies, rather than just responding to what they heard at the event itself.

Minus a keynote speaker: Rather than leading with a politician or expert, we had three members of our planning committee give short introductory comments outlining the purpose of the event, sharing some of Rep. McGuire’s positions and actions, and giving guidelines for participation in the town hall. Another planning group member led a one-song sing-along as others brought out a cardboard cutout of McGuire. From the stage, leaders urged participants not to respond or engage if anyone chose to voice offensive views, and to let the marshals handle any disruption. (As it happened, we had no security issues during the event.)

Maximizing participation: Ushers placed four microphones in the aisles of the auditorium and guided those with questions to line up where they wouldn’t block the audience’s view. Several local and state officials had come to offer their comments, and they lined up with everyone else for their two minutes at the mic. Our tech crew kept track of time and turned off the mic after each speaker had two minutes. This part of the program lasted approximately one hour.

The speakers were calm and sincere, and the range of topics and concerns, from cancer research to veterans’ services, was much wider than we’ve seen at similar events in the past. For example, participants asked:

• Why did you vote to betray our veterans?

• How do you account for your actions that have jeopardized thousands of existing jobs in your district?

• Massive economic harm [is being done] to farming businesses due to cuts to USDA, farm-to-school and farm-to-food bank programs. What will you do to preserve family farms in our district?

• Are you working on keeping costs low for families, protecting and serving the military, or just serving Donald Trump?

Lesson learned: Technology Matters. We should have spent more time practicing how to record and livestream the event. Tech troubles caused us to start late, and made it necessary to splice audio to produce a hi-res recording for use after the event.

Wrapping up the event: Two quick speakers and another song later, the event ended. As the participants left the event, each received a “Next Steps” flyer to help them increase their involvement and effectiveness as activists (e.g., dates of upcoming events, contact information for elected officials, web links to local groups working on key issues).

Fundraising: To cover the event costs, we included an appeal for small donations, both in the Eventbrite invitation and during the program.

Amplifying Our Voices Before and Beyond the Event

Before the town hall: The April town hall followed two months of efforts to get McGuire to speak to Charlottesville-area constituents. After repeated invitations went unacknowledged, we held a press conference in March to amplify our request. Again, crickets from McGuire. So on April 11, we filmed a group of our members sending him an invitation by certified letter and shared the video with local media. Then, when the Congressman was in Charlottesville for a private event two days before our town hall, we “bird-dogged” him, filming a member cheerfully greeting him on the street outside the event to invite him to our town hall.

On film, Rep. McGuire and his staffers said they’d never received an invitation and knew nothing about it. Since invitations were issued through many channels, this hard-to-believe response got a lot of attention in the community and increased attention for our event.

After the town hall: The event was covered by local media, and we recorded the program and posted the full video on YouTube and (with additional content) NowComment. We shared clips of particularly compelling testimony and photos with local media (the local public radio station aired several of these clips in its coverage). A few days after the event, six members of our group traveled to Rep. McGuire’s office in Washington, D.C. to deliver the box of almost 600 handwritten cards collected at the town hall. We videoed the visit. We followed up a few days later by sending Rep. McGuire’s office the complete town hall video.

What we accomplished: We didn’t expect to change John McGuire’s mind or his votes with our town hall, though we did hope that we might help him understand that his constituents have real concerns that should be heard.

Rep. McGuire does appear to have gotten the message that constituents want him to hold town halls. After our event, he began calling some of his private events “town halls,” and held a “telephone town hall” for prescreened questions a few weeks later. Our local newspaper ran a lengthy story calling McGuire out for his deceptive language and making it clear that he has yet to meet with his constituents in an open and unscripted setting.

Our primary goals in holding the event were to help local residents speak truth to power and inspire them to further action. From our own observations and the overwhelmingly positive comments of people who participated, we’re confident that we met our goals. We hope other groups are inspired and can learn from our process.

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Kristin Layng Szakos is a community activist who served on the Charlottesville City Council from 2010 through 2017. She is a retired writer and editor and co-author of two books on community organizing.

Dan Doernberg facilitates the Defending Democracy action team for Indivisible Charlottesville. In a previous life, he co-founded Silicon Valley’s landmark Computer Literacy Bookshops and led the Fairness dot com team that developed the NowComment multimedia discussion/annotation tool.

For information about Indivisible Charlottesville, visit https://www.indivisiblecharlottesville.org/

and

https://bsky.app/profile/indivisiblecville.bsky.social

For related resources from Indivisible (National), check out the Town Hall Guide and Town Hall Resources