In what I found to be a disturbingly blinkered view of congressional indifference to public desires, an op-ed by political scientists Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Matto Mildenberger and Leah Stokes states:
Congress [on both sides of the aisle] doesn’t know what policies Americans support. We know that because we asked the most senior staff members in Congress — the people who help their bosses decide what bills to pursue and support — what they believed public opinion was in their district or state on a range of issues.
In a research paper, we compared their responses with our best guesses of what the public in their districts or states actually wanted using large-scale public opinion surveys and standard
models. Across the board, we found that congressional aides are wildly inaccurate in their perceptions of their constituents’ opinions and preferences.
For instance, if we took a group of people who reflected the makeup of America and asked them whether they supported background checks for gun sales, nine out of 10 would say yes. But congressional aides guessed as few as one in 10 citizens in their district or state favored the policy. Shockingly, 92 percent of the staff members we surveyed underestimated support in their district or state for background checks, including all Republican aides and over 85 percent of Democratic aides.
The same is true for the four other issues we looked at: regulating carbon emissions to address the climate crisis, repealing the Affordable Care Act, raising the federal minimum wage and investing in infrastructure.
In a related column, Paul Krugman writes that the scholars' "opinion piece … seems to confirm something I already suspected: misunderstanding of what voters want is distorting both political positioning and public policy."
Hooey, hogwash and humbug.
Congressional politicians and their sycophantic aides know precisely what the public at large as well as their districts and states want; both examine opinion polls as though they're the Oracle of Delphi. No one is better informed about mass opinion than congressfolk and their staffers (who, nevertheless, mouth whatever their bosses "believe"). But of course what the public wants and what politicians' hyperactivist primary voters want can be, and usually are, completely at odds.
Hence Crackpot Inc. — its Louie Gohmerts, its Pete Sessionses, its James Inhofes — persists in spouting and legislatively advocating the most fatuous, antisocial proposals known to troglodytic knuckle-draggers, rib-scratchers and lice-pickers.
That the three social-science researchers above and Mr. Krugman (intentionally?) missed the bloody obvious is, to me, disturbing — in that the researchers' findings merely confirmed what they wanted confirmed. Scholarship is sacred, and should be more honest, for without erudite objectivity, none of us can really know the truths that lie out there.