Last week I urged House Republicans to embrace a modern, different strategy better utilizing the Internet to unify their collective voice: let your messengers play ball as free-agents under the banner of "Republican" and win more voters at the end of the day.

Joyner, Ruffini, and Beales disagreed thoughtfully, and that's cool with me. Like NetFlix, we're able to keep this discussion going as long as we want. And I'm going to keep this one in the queue a day or two longer.

Like most of you, today I was perusing The Next Right and stumbled upon a great *promoted* diary by Josh Kahn jumping into the discussion, "Unifying Trends for President, Microtrends for Congress." I want to build upon this nugget:

People don’t pay much attention to broad messages from congressional candidates, but voters care a lot more when a candidate talks about their specific micro issue.

That's the blatantly honest truth, isn't it? House Republicans are neither leading the agenda of the nation nor setting the message for their own body.

But they are not irrelevant. They play a vital role as the most vocal, well-connected cogs in the distributed Republican network. They are the key, bottom-up strategy if you will, to winning back our diminishing base and winning over Gen Next and Millennial voters. House Republicans should get back to basics by communicating better on the local issues that people actually want to hear their opinions on.

As a former House Republican staffer who worked for a Leadership office, my job as a communicator, every single day, was to get out in front of issues/narratives being crafted in the media and help try and wrangle Members of Congress (and their staff) to hit broad themes, Republican messaging points, and hammer the Democrats on the hits we thought would help them get ahead in their district. Sure, we tried and had some success but at the end of the day we were herding cats.

Now that I've stepped aside that role, my perspective has changed.

By design, Members of Congress agree to disagree. They are elected by real people to represent one specific district somewhere in our nation. They know best how to win re-election in their district, (just ask them). It's the nature of an elected official to want to win re-election. They will fight for their turf. They will speak out on the issues that they and their constituents support.

What I've concluded is that Members of Congress inherently will stray from the herd when it comes to their backyard. Stop the infighting over national issues. Agree to let Republicans be Republicans -- whatever that means to them and theirs.

This distributed message by distributed messengers in a distributed network is the key to being successful and helping unify a House Republican Conference.

Yes, House Republicans, you do need to start communicating more effectively, and that certainly means a better, smarter embrace of the Internet. But it's not a national audience you need to be targeting, it's the citizens who elected you in the first place.