#5 - Jay Propes: Advocacy in Real-Time & The Future of Politics

Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr. And today we're diving into the fast paced world of advocacy with a true expert Jay Propes. Jay is a seasoned political and strategic consultant and lobbyist with over 30 years of experience in public affairs, government relations at both state and federal levels. Jay began his career on Capitol Hill like me, working for Congressman Rahul.

In 1992, he moved often and spent eight years running the Texas Optimal Logical Association, advocating on behalf of nearly 900 Texas physicians and surgeons before the Texas Legislature, agencies and U.S. Congress. Today, Jay is a partner at Mercury Public Affairs. He's here to share insight on the demand for real time, accurate information and how it's fundamentally transformed advocacy work over the years.

We'll discuss how this impacts lobbyists, lawmakers, business leaders, and stay on top of the legislature. There's a lot of updates and crucial, challenging things. More than ever before. Thank you so much Jay for joining us today. True expert in advocacy and public affairs. This is Jay Propes. Jay Propes has a deep understanding of the shifts happening in the legislative landscape and Jay.

I'm very excited to welcome you to the show. Thank you. Good to be here. Yes. How has your first week of bill filing been so far? Well, we won the first day, but, you know, we've seen 1400 or so, 1500 bills. The last time I saw, some old fan favorites, some, refile bills that will not be heard in this session as they've not been in previous sessions.

Some grand ideas. Some, continue banging in the head against the wall. And some ideas. That kind of change changed hands from, from year to year. I saw, there was a constitutional amendment filed to allow for initiative in referenda, in the state filed by Senator Nathan Johnson, which I imagine will get approved by a lot of, Republicans saying, that's a bad idea and it's not what we do.

But until 1996, it was in the GOP platform in this state to have initiative and referenda. So what you have is when you're in there, what you perceive to be a permanent majority, you don't want it when you're in what's perceived to be a very likely permanent minority. You want it. So that's one of those things change, priorities over the years.

Well, Jay, I know I gave you a good, introduction of your bio, but can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? Well, you don't already know. I've been fortunate to to be here in Austin and the capital community, for, since 1992. And, worked in Congress prior to that, after I graduated from college.

And, have, seen, maturation and sophistication of both the inside and outside of the capital, seeing from where it really was the same 2 or 300 people every day to, people participating in the process that never go in again and participate meaningfully. I've seen communication at, and kind of an air cover and, 50,000ft level become a lot more important than the shoe leather in the hallway everyday and more impactful and, seeing a lot more people serving in the legislature who have lived in Texas less time than I've been a lobbyist in Texas, which is a change to that didn't happen very much.

I'm excited to talk to you more about that with your expertise and experience, and how advocacy has changed over the years, and lobbying from an expert like you. So, I know that you've mentioned and we've talked about this a lot, is your, constant, having to constantly update, your clients, your stakeholders and members. How are you keeping up with the dramatic, you know, the sheer volume of information is coming in all the time.

Well, you have to be more. You have to not only be aware of the information that's available, but you have to be cognizant of the fact that most things are obsolete as soon as you press send or print. In fact, it's almost misleading to provide, reports and things like that to clients anymore because it's meaningless except to be a historical narrative, anymore.

And also, when I started in this business long ago, information was updated when someone else provided it, probably 15 years or so ago, close to 20. Members of the legislature and your staff started being able to curate and receive information, on your issues, on issues that were important to them, that you might be in a position of having to either defend or explain or negate.

When you go in to visit with someone, it's not just the information you gave them or someone on the other side of your issue. There's a lot more information inputted because of, easy access and the fact that the information, it's not just Google searches anymore and Google alerts, information is delivered and curated to these people from different sources.

And you have to be aware of what's out there. So how is it compare to when you started out, what the process looked like to now? And what's the biggest cause of that shift, do you think? It's the cheapness of circulating information. It's seriously, was it as expensive as printing and distributing back then, which was both expensive and slow and manipulable as far as who got what kind of information?

You have to assume now that if you put something out there, the people who are supportive and against you are going to have the same information, the same time and the ability to react to it simultaneously. That was not the case before. It is. It's always been difficult to keep a secret around the castle because people just keep their just can't keep their mouths closed.

Now, it's the the electronic information is going to make things so fast, that there are immediate and you have to have the right information because secret is not going to work. Absolutely. And yet social media and then just AI technology and new technologies, one like ours, obviously this is a big, use case of ours is keeping people up to speed.

So how has I changed the way you do lobbying and advocacy work? I would say, it's replace some of the manual work that we all used to do to look at how, different members reacted to different issues and how they voted with other members on certain issues. That used to be a very manual, process, to try to line up different votes and different clusters of, of elections, and elected officials and how they reacted.

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I does that and has for several sessions now, made that automated. Also, you can go see the bill filing today. You can put that in AI, machine of any of the other ones that are available, but you can create your own, template through them. You can say you can pull up a bill, find out what states similar legislation has been considered in in the past year, what groups testified for in favor and against them.

And you've got your your path to to get to work on on what you need to do. You're killing a bill or passing it. That was not available for that was a very, heavy, research intensive kind of thing where you had to go through everyone's own state legislative website to figure out how to use those, digest that information and line them up.

That's done. The click never used to make it easy for you. So how do you see that changing? This is the early days of AI. So in the next 5 to 10 years, how do you think that's going to change the game of lobbying? I personally think it'll change a lot. I think it's going to it's going to require that lobbyists who have not really thought it important before to become experts on their clients issues to do so, they have to be able to answer questions as if their client was standing there with them, because they may not have the opportunity again, and the information could change before they get that opportunity again.

There are some people who, who actually, have built very successful practices on just being almost, introducer of their clients to legislators and letting the client serve as the, as the, as the expert. There's not time for that anymore because you're not going to have that that many chances interaction. You better be ready with the information and and the same information that people who don't want you to succeed have.

That's already changed a lot. Interesting. And do you think that the transparency is an overall good and help to the business? In general, I think it certainly serves the legislators and staff a whole lot more to be able to compare apples to apples with the quality of information. They're getting interesting. And now with just the sheer volume of bills, and we're hearing rumors of upwards of 20,000 bills being filed this session.

I'm not sure if that's from I, it as well as, you know, with bill drafting potential use cases, you know, how have they been able to draft out many more bills. But that's more than, double, almost double last session with around 11,000 bills filed last session. And then that's almost the same amount. That's more than double the federal government what they found year.

So we do that in six months. How are you preparing for this influx of bills at unprecedented rate? Well, first of all, well, there is a number of bills filed. I think every session there's increasingly more duplicate bills or near duplicate bills because it just gets easier and easier to follow. Bill, before you actually had to have a council draft, you had to have blue backs.

You had to have hard copies filed with the clerk here. Now it's point click. There's no there's a diligence to it. The the barriers to entry as it were. So you don't have a council attorney going, hey, I'm already drafting this for somebody else. Do you really want to do this meeting? Are you going to take my time to do this twice?

Now it's just the same copy we're going to file to for the, you know, younger audience. If they are listening, what has been what was the process like back then compared to now? Very manual, very deliberate. And cost a lot more investment, of the office. And every bill was filed because of them. There was some, true, ownership issues.

If you got a mail file, if somebody filed a duplicate, it was something of an insult. It's not now. It's just part of it. You expected, and most of the time that people will file Bill without a whole lot of, contemplation about it, because it really doesn't take that much out of their staff anymore. They used to take quite a bit of staff work to get a bill ready to file.

Absolutely. Even from, you know, 12 years ago when I started on Capitol Hill, too, it was a lot more work and fewer pieces. So interesting. How do you think is going to change the game the most, the session in terms of the legislative process? That's a good question. It depends on on how the legislature tries to use it and how comfortable they are.

And, learning from other states if they want to use what's happened in other states as a, as a roadmap for themselves, if they want to, to, you know, deny themselves that or make sure that they're not, influenced by that, it'll be, less impactful. I think, for legislative staff who have trouble keeping up with where their members are in committees, I think it's going to be easier for staff to keep abreast of things that are happening in committees that they're interested in, but that their particular legislator is not a member of, that it has been in the past.

I think that's going to be a big change. I think so, too. I'm excited for it. As a former staffer, that was actually the reason I started to use language, was trying to make sure I was keeping up with what was happening in all the different committees and then rulemaking process with state agency meetings. There's just you can't be everywhere at once.

So I do think that that's a big advantage. When I was on the Senate side, I would always be I don't even know my bill was up in the House today and it would be so frustrating. So I do think that's a huge, that's an exciting one. I'm excited to see what the staff think of that. So, speaking of kind of, you know, you're using so many different, softwares, I know you're more tech savvy than most.

What do you see? As you know, how are you keeping this information accurate as well as timely in general? Well, that's why you're never going to replace the human input on this, because only you know, if you just allow things to be generated by an AI, function, then it's going to be accurate to a point, and then just going to start making assumptions that it makes from from other points of reference.

And also the legislative world has terms of art that I still doesn't quite grasp and will misunderstand and apply wrongly. You still have to have your own, you know, ability to discern what's correct and what's not and what's important, what's not. You can't just have you know, word salads of, of stuff just because it to be generated and say all of that's important.

You know, I've seen it a lot already, and you can tell us that things are AI generated. There's a whole lot of superfluous information that misses the strong and the most poignant points you're trying to make if you let it be like that. So the real thing about that, I can see with, AI being helpful is it will, if you know how to tune it to, to help you, it will help you make sure that you miss less.

But if you try to make it, tell your story, if you make it, do your work for you and generate your story, you're going to wind up with, with, a lot of white noise. Yeah. You see it already? Yeah. I couldn't agree more. That human side of things is going to be more valuable than ever. I don't see, replacing communications and lobbying anytime soon.

The need for in-person communication and just discussion is bigger than ever. So, we've definitely talked about a little bit of AI's impact, but, what are kind of the practical benefits you see from legislative tracking and public affairs with AI and maybe some of the tools that you're using that are helping you right now? I think and again, AI is thorough to a fault, right?

It produces more, data and input than you need so that you don't miss anything. You're you still want to have to sift through quite a bit, of information. And, and there's really no good way for that to be done, except to know from your experience, your, knowledge, how to apply that. And, again, you can tell the difference if people don't know, the difference in that.

But I think the ability to keep an eye on and an ear to a lot more geographies, meetings, people, new sources all the same, and get them curated to you to help, to help make your points. AI is already been a big help to that. If you know how to use it. And I think even if you don't use it again, you need to be very familiar with the tools that are available out there so that you know what is being generated in your sphere.

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Even if you choose not to use drones because they're being used somewhere in your world. Absolutely. Customization. It does a really good job at if you can become a prompt engineer and figure out how to exactly create it, I find that's a great use. But one of the pieces I'm most fascinated by is machine learning and how it can handle.

I can handle really large amounts of data that we could never have even simply sifted through before. How do you feel about, you know, predictive analytics, how that's going to impact potentially decisions you make in the future? I know there's something we're working on right now is creating things that can predict outcomes. How do you feel about that going into the future?

I think that is, probably one of the least reliable applications, in this world because, as I was told a long time ago here as a lobbyist, your job is to find out is to, is to get legislators to do what your client needs. But for their reasons, you have to know their reasons. And when 181 legislators there for 400 reasons, and they are from different perspectives and different points of view and their own experience or knowledge, and there is no way really to do predictive analytics.

Which one of those reasons is the most important on any one day to, to, to guide their decision making? So that's, that's why the interpersonal relationships are always going to be key. I was going to say the human element, you knowing those people is going to be important. Hence I change the way you interact with different groups or stakeholders.

And I'm not I haven't, let I haven't taken that tact on things. I haven't, I don't let I generate email responses for me. I do not, let it, do anything other than get me started on, articles I have to write or, or any kind of whitepapers that you provide. I ask it to aggregate things for white papers.

I don't ever ask it to respond to communications, but that's for for right now. What kind of implications do you see for transparency and policymaking? Well, I think the opposite is probably true on transparency there. As you're able to engineer things, you'll be able to create obfuscation and red herrings that misdirect people, and be able to create, artificial, large model learning of those.

And you have to be you have to be mindful of that. It's already out there. It's what, what in Twitter or to, to informational research. And so I think you're gonna see a lot more of that. And you have to be, again, discerning or you just say whichever one has the most papers, pages generated must be correct.

Not true. One of the, concerns I've seen and poor use case for I was, kind of responses and laughs to the capital staff. So does an influx of, you know, emails coming to staff on petitions and things like that. So I'm wondering how that's going to be this first session with, you know, a lot of information getting generated like that.

It's funny. You know, it's an annoyance that's ever worked in a legislative office has been, the recipient of, A postcard campaign or somewhere. The same postcard comes from 2000 people, and maybe 500 of them are in your district, and all that stuff is just an annoyance. So I'm going to have to enter all these addresses and create some sort of response from my boss to them.

But when you get 2000, I generated communications that the people whose name on it may not even be aware that they were sent, and they are either inaccurate or incomplete or misleading. I think people are going to find it insulting. And if you're behind the effort to just paper up someone's office with AI generated communications, you may get you may show the client that you created all these different contacts, but you're not certain claim you're insulting those the legislators and staff and as if they don't know that this is just generated to create more input for them, without more volume, without more value, volume without value.

And I think it'll be hard to differentiate who is a genuine constituent. Need to, just a potential kind of hacker and fake, account completely. Yeah, there's definitely some interesting ways, that's being used. How, do you think, you know, from your personal experience, people can start preparing for this next wave of advocacy and the changes that we're about to see?

I really think it should. People should, should sign up for and and test themselves against different AI, modalities. Okay. And like I said, they may find one that really helps them and helps them, organize and, and, put some dynamism into their own work that makes it easier to stay updated. On the other hand, they need to know and recognize the tools that are used to create those red herrings and the false information against their own clients interest.

There's a rhythm and rhyme to it, and you recognize it when you see it. It's good, good advice. So I'm a bit of a sci fi nerd personally. Where do you see us five, ten years from now? With the Technol technological advancements? I think, there's going to be, a time where we have to get to better trust in and, in technology.

And if we step back from that a little bit, but the whole about, two times the, allegations of election fraud and things like that, that, that just because we wanted to be able to count votes quickly and, and make sure people knew outcomes that were allegations of, of, you know, manipulation and things like that. I think there's going to come a time when we'll have several states and will go where there'll be mobile voting from your from your electronic device.

You won't be standing in line anymore. There's a that's that. Experian experiments already been pretty successful among military votes. And I think when you start seeing that, you'll see participation, not only will it go up, but it will also vacillate. A lot more people will actually decide if it's about the same effort to vote is not vote.

You may have some people intentionally stay out of elections. I think that kind of thing is going to have more impact. And I think people will, will have more relevance to, to things like the legislature. I don't know what percentage of Texans even know where the legislature is in, in session, but it's a lot more impactful on their lives than Congress is.

Just like their county commissioners court is more impactful on their lives in Congress, and they just don't get the following on it. As much as I think there'll be more people following local governments, because it will be, no matter the size of the city, or county, I think there will be access to that information more immediately, more correctly, to the citizens.

I think that's going to happen pretty quickly. That's exciting. Yeah. It's something we're trying to do with local government. Jay, any of the things you'd like to discuss on this before we kind of start doing closing? Just, I as much automation and electronic enhancement and and all the things that have changed in my career, it still is a hard thing for me to see some of the great writers that come out of the Capitol come out the Capitol staff.

I'm just amazed at, the talent that is still there. And I think that's always going to be important. And, I hope, I hope that working in the Capitol helps people have that skill. Turn to a on that skill. Because, it's not you can get by with that these days, but, someone has to be able to continue to craft and and, and make a meaningful message that is salient and, has some commonality to it that everybody can understand.

And I think that's still something worth doing. AI is not replacing that. In fact, it is putting more, like I said, volume with that value around it. I agree, I think it's going to be more respect for organic content. I saw a new use case recently for an app that, allowed you to clone yourself and generate new content by typing in a script, and it would make a video for you.

People are going to know those things are fake, and I think it's going to come with this more craving for, you know, authentic journalism, real writing, real person content or podcast long form where people can hear what people are actually saying. So I do agree. I think there's some good, definitely good things with it. And then it's more for handling some of the more, you know, mundane tasks.

But very interesting to have you. Okay. Thank you so much for for being on the show and for sharing your insights that so much wisdom with, with all your background. So anything else you want to add about the ledge coming up before we close out? They're all different, and they all tend to be like a mosaic that the pieces fall into.

And it's only when you get back and look at it that it all makes sense. You don't have the ability, and I doesn't have the ability to project those pieces ahead of time. And, that's, that's one of the individuals, in this process and this legislature in this business will always be the people that make that that come together.

I'm glad you're involved in that and the pleasure to be working with you. So thank you again. And to our listeners, remember to subscribe to Bills and Business. And, Jay, where can they find you if they want to do, join your conversation where you can find me and all our team at Mercury llc.com. Oh, thank you, thank you.

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