In 2011, The Washington Post reported that Edelman helped API cast “REAL PEOPLE not Actors” in an Energy Citizens TV commercial highlighting “American Made Energy.”
The following year, API kicked off “Vote 4 Energy,” the next chapter of Energy Citizens, which featured “supposedly average people looking into the camera and saying ‘I vote… for American domestic energy’ and promoting the industry’s goals of opening up more land to drilling,” as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a watchdog group, described it.