AN INTRODUCTION TO SEASONED POLITICAL LOBBYING: THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
The Heritage Foundation (HF) was founded in Washington D.C. in 1973. It is an American ‘think-tank’ with the sole objective of promoting conservative values, policies, and politics. Kevin D. Roberts, the current president of HF, has been a direct influence on the 47th presidency by successfully installing Project 2025 within the Trump administration. He is better known for this statement: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless ― if the left allows it to be.” Project 2025 was the ninth quadrennial installment of HF’s Mandate for Leadership series, meaning that, since the Reagan administration, HF has been involved in shaping American politics for the conservative party and the conservative party only.
It is not uncommon for HF to send fake ballots along with misinformation mailers to residents around the country with the malicious intent to fabricate data and lobby for causes that promote the conservative agenda. These policies pose severe threats to the individual rights and liberties Americans have fought for and maintained through the lifespan of the United States Constitution. HF uses these mailers to target low-income areas, including those in blue states. If you happen to receive anything from The Heritage Foundation, know that it is in bad faith.
SECTION 1
1.1. Misleading: The Heritage Foundation has published and defended anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, anti-public education, anti-immigrant, and pro-small governance rhetoric, making them right-wing and therefore partisan.
SECTION 2
2.1. Disingenuous: One of the founding members of the Heritage Foundation was Joseph Coors, beer magnate and big business titan; the other two founders had political careers in Washington, D.C., and have been influential in government policies.
SECTION 3
3.1. Telling: Heritage Foundation aligns itself to the “new direction” of the second Trump administration and Trump voters, despite claims of non-partisanship (Section 1).
3.2 True: A better health care system is very important for Americans; as 66% of Americans who file bankruptcy blame medical expenses.
SECTION 4
4.1. Marketing Technique: Though there is no imminent vote or policy change regarding American health care, this mailer uses language that is urgent (“even sooner if possible”) and fear-mongering (“before it’s too late”).
4.2. Logical fallacy: Slippery slope of doing an action now is the only course of prevention to worse results.
SECTION 5
5.1 Misleading: Health care costs have skyrocketed, but expansion of Medicaid and other federal health programs have made enrolled patients more financially secure.
5.2 Misleading: Barack Obama repeatedly cited the Heritage Foundation as originating many of the ideas that would become Affordable Care Act, after following Mitt Romney’s role in reforming health care in Massachusetts (also orchestrated by the Foundation)
SECTION 6
6.1. Logical fallacy: The opening sentence contains an appeal to probability in that without the desired action, the following statements are assumed to happen.
6.2. Misleading: Medicare going broke refers to a projected insolvency date published by the Board of Trustees. The insolvency date of Medicare is projected to be 2036, but this statement does not address that even in 2036, Medicare will still have sufficient funds to pay 89% of its Hospital Fund.
SECTION 7
7.1. False: Health care coverage and issues were not a high voter priority.
7.2. False: Section 5 calls the Affordable Care Act (colloquially known as Obamacare) a “nightmarish system” and Section 7 states that President Trump’s team will “end this nightmare”. A social media post by Donald Trump on October 31, 2024 says, “Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act. I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing.” Both statements cannot be true at the same time.
SECTION 8
8.1. Telling: Section 1 castigates “Big Government” and Section 8 rails against “Deep State bureaucrats” but Section 10 seeks to legitimize the author Kevin D. Roberts by citing his “decades in public policy and politics”.
SECTION 9
9.1. Misleading: United States citizens also spend more on health care than any other developed countries’ citizens; America is the only developed country without single-payer government health insurance.
9.2. Lack of clarity: Wealthy countries is undefined, causing “lowest life expectancy at birth” and “highest obesity rates” to be possibly true or false statements.
9.3. Misleading, unrelated items: Americans have the highest rate of people with multiple chronic diseases but this overlooks socioeconomic factors for this rate that can be identified down to zip code.
9.4. Misleading The United States has the 10th highest obesity rate.
9.5. Section 9 is Ballot Question 1
BALLOT QUESTION ONE
SECTION 10
10.1. Misleading: The pluralization of “tax hikes” is incorrect. Closing a specific tax loophole that allows billionaires and other high-earners to avoid Medicare taxes, “along with eliminating other ways around the tax for wealthy business owners, could raise more than $250 billion over 10 years for Medicare” based on ProPublica Research and government studies.
10.2. False: Undocumented individuals (“illegal immigrants”) are not eligible for Medicare and other federal health insurance plans and there is no current Congressional movement to change this.
10.3. Section 10 is Ballot Question 5 (with “to defend Medicare” switched to “to safeguard Medicare”)
BALLOT QUESTION FIVE
SECTION 11
11.1. Misleading: The $86 billion of “improper payments” refers to a 2020 Government Accountability Office report. A subsequent report from 2023 has highlighted successful programs put in place to reduce this number.
11.2. Misleading: In response to news of DOGE working on Medicare and Medicaid waste, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, “Fraud, waste and abuse have always been a focus of the federal agencies. One of the things that happened with the Obama administration was really ramping up the kind of fraud rooting-out activities that we did in coordination with the Department of Justice. The notion that this is somehow an undiscovered area that people who are not at all familiar with the programs or the way they operate are going to suddenly be able to identify and root out is just flat out wrong.”
11.3. Section 11 is Ballot Question 6
BALLOT QUESTION SIX
SECTION 12
12.1. Misleading: A law to address the lack of price transparency in medical bills was proposed and enacted in August of 2021 after the bipartisan No Surprises Act. The question at the end of this section is disingenuous, as this issue has had the support of many members of Congress, and the issue is in enforcement of price transparency, which is unaddressed by the mailer.
12.2. Section 12 is Ballot Question 4
BALLOT QUESTION FOUR
SECTION 13
13.1 Misleading: It is true that the United States does not only have private insurance, but it does not solely have public insurance; it is a mixed system. However, government bureaucrats (public sphere) and insurance bureaucrats (private sphere) are separate actors and the quote by the House Freedom Caucus - considered the most conservative factor within Congress - accuses them as a singular group.
13.2 Section 13 is Ballot Question 3
BALLOT QUESTION THREE
SECTION 14
14.1. Uninformative, emotive: The pamphlet does not outline concrete policy changes, actions, or legislation to combat these identified problems, but uses emotive language to compel (corrupt, destructive) and fearmonger (Nothing will change; stuck; nightmare).
14.2. Disingenuous: Section 9 notes “among wealthy nations,” the United States spends the most on healthcare, part of which is caused by having the “flexibility in…. care coverage” of 300 different insurance providers.
14.3. Section 14 is Ballot Question 8
BALLOT QUESTION EIGHT
SECTION 15
15.1. Misleading: Section 15 criticizes special interests and lobbyists, but then states that Heritage speaks out “on Capitol Hill”; a private organization, also known as a special interest, speaking out on Capitol Hill is what lobbying is.
15.2. Emotive: Using emotive language without clear identification, “the Washington forces,” creates the logical fallacy of false dilemma: us versus them.
SECTION 16
16.1. Logically consistent: First bullet referencing competition and free market matches earlier sections of this letter.
16.2. Logical fallacy: Second bullet refers to health insurance that relies on current employment, which is a non sequitur as employer-sponsored health insurance does not appear in this appeal previously.
SECTION 17
17.1. Logical fallacy: The first bullet has the definist fallacy, in which Obamacare is described as having “massive amounts of regulation, taxation and spending,” using loaded language to increase the strength of the author's argument.
17.2. False, fearmongering: There is no proposed legislation to allow undocumented individuals access to taxpayer-funded health insurance, despite undocumented individuals paying into the system with payroll taxes.
17.3. Logical fallacy: “Matters of faith” such as abortion and protecting the unborn are non-sequiturs in a letter penned by a non-religious institution, and is not previously addressed in the appeal.
17.4. Section 17 are Ballot Questions 7 (faith) and 9 (immigrants)
BALLOT QUESTION SEVEN
BALLOT QUESTION NINE
SECTION 18
18.1. Marketing technique: False sense of inclusion is fostered with usage of “we,” “representative,” “selected to represent your area”.
SECTION 19
19.1. Marketing technique, disingenuous: Shifts the opinion espoused in the letter onto the recipient with “your outrage” (emphasis added) despite there being no fillable or opinion section to be completed.
19.2. Emotive: Uses “you and your family” to incite anxiety and fan protective emotions.
SECTION 20
20.1. True: The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, has been operating for over 50 years.
20.2. Fearmongering: “us” is “All Americans who cherish liberty” with the implication that disagreement with the letter/Heritage makes the recipient an American who does not cherish liberty, or anti-American.
20.3. Logical fallacy: False equivalency of “Big government [who] doesn’t solve problems” with “health care mess that’s been forced on our country”; argument does not account for outside actors.
SECTION 21
21.1. Mostly true: “No one is more effective than Heritage at battling the Left” - The Center for American Progress identifies itself as Left-leaning, and they opened in 2003 specifically as opposition to the Heritage Foundation.
SECTION 22
22.1. True: The Heritage Foundation cited “unacceptable overreach” by the government and stated that not infringing “personal liberties” was more important than OSHA’s argument for population immunization against COVID-19. This lawsuit was filed in 2021; from 2020 to 2023, COVID-19 killed 1.1 million Americans.
SECTION 23
23.1. Misleading: “Life better for the American people” - Heritage cites their success in overturning COVID vaccine mandates but as of 2024, 17 million American adults have long COVID; groups with higher vaccination rates have been shown to have lower rates of long COVID.
23.2. True: The Heritage Foundation did create the Mandates for Leadership, which is considered to be the conservative policy Bible.
23.3. Telling: Section 1 claims Heritage Foundation is non-partisan, but Section 23 underlines their conservative framework.
23.4. Marketing technique: “Us” (patriots like you) versus “them” (non-patriots).
23.5. Telling: First mention of a single-payer health care system.
SECTION 24
24.1. Lack of clarity: Who are the “Leftists”? What proposals by Trump will make health care better?
SECTION 25
25.1. Misleading: The letter conflates the specific recipients of this letter (who Section 18 states are specifically selected) and “the public” (emphasis added) in line 1.
25.2. Disingenuous: A fact is a neutral piece of information with no bias either way; immediately proposing that those facts will document how Americans are “hurt” by the current healthcare system displays a bias towards facts that prove their conclusion (line 2).
SECTION 26
26.1. Lack of clarity: Policymakers and public officials, also known as bureaucrats or government officials, are criticized in other sections (Section 25, Section 20, Section 15, Section 14, etc.).
SECTION 27
27.1. Lack of clarity: There is no definition for “the media” here; the definition of media is any mass communication, such as broadcasting, printed publication, and digital tools. This mailer is a printed mass communication, but has not been censored.
27.2. Disingenuous: This mailer criticizes of “Big Tech”; looking at the Heritage website, their largest argument about Big Tech censorship centers on the Mike Gonzalez book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution” (which blames crime on “divisive critical race theory”) which Amazon refused to allow on their sales platform. This is neither relevant to a discussion on health care nor a long-term issue, as Heritage won their appeal against Amazon and the book is available for sale.
27.3. Misleading: The daily number of 10 million Americans is not verifiable; page 5 of their 2024 Annual Report lists all their digital media viewers and does not support this specific number anywhere.
SECTION 28
28.1. Misleading: Heritage Foundation’s self-published Annual Report from 2023 states that almost 3/4 of operating budget comes from individual donations, and an independent audit put that dollar amount at $93 million dollars. However, there is no consensus or demographics on who those individuals are, which makes the “citizens like you” misleading; well known financiers of Heritage Foundation, such as Heritage-founding billionaire Joseph Coors and billionaires Richard Uihlein and Charles Koch, are all individuals.
28.2. Lack of clarity: Who are the “Leftist politicians” and “Washington bureaucrats”? Previous Sections say the “health care nightmare” is caused by “lobbyists from hospitals, insurance conglomerates and drug companies” (Section 24), “Big Pharma” (Section 14), “Health care special interests” (Section 13).
SECTION 29
29.1. Lack of clarity: The “10 million supporters” (previously referenced in Section 27) does not have an identifiable source.
SECTION 30
30.1. Missing: This mailer (four pages plus the ballot) does not propose what the “health care system that works for you and all families” would look like.
30.2. Disingenuous: Heritage Foundation usage of “all families” is misrepresentative, as they define a family only as a married and heterosexual couple with a child, and they distribute rhetoric by Ryan T. Anderson, who has called same-sex marriage a heresy, and states that accepting transgender identities is harmful to “the common good, particularly to children.”
SECTION 31
31.1. Telling: The combination of forces (“Big Pharma…. bureaucrats”) is not directly specified until the post-script.
31.2. Lack of clarity: If this is to show“the public,” who are the stated “Americans [who] are serious” about health care reform?
31.3. Logical fallacy:The last sentence of this paragraph is a false exclusionary disjunct; the recipient not having their opinion counted in this mailer is “letting the status quo win”.
SECTION 32
32.1. Marketing technique: Ballots being returned within 5 days creates a sense of urgency, though there is no timeline stated.
32.2. Non-sequitur: Though the mailer is on health care, Trump’s team is “defend[ing] the American Dream”
32.3. Fearmongering, logical fallacy: The definist fallacy appears again with the loaded language of “hard-fought” “restore… greatness”, mandate “doesn’t go to waste”.