Members of Congress and their staff think voters are far more conservative than they really are—and lobbyists and business groups are making that worse. A new study coming out in the American Political Science Review by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University and Matto Mildenberger and Leah C. Stokes of The University of California, Santa Barbara echoes results we’ve seen before showing that politicians think voters skew way to the right of reality. But it adds disturbing new information about how that happens.
While senior staffers for congressional Democrats underestimated support for repealing Obamacare, Democrats were otherwise much closer to what polls show about public opinion in their districts on five issues the researchers explored:
On the question of gun background checks, for instance, staffers in Republican offices underestimated public support by 49 percentage points. Democrats underestimated too, by 11 percentage points. Republican staffers also underestimated support for carbon dioxide regulation, infrastructure spending and minimum wage hikes by 20 percentage points or more. Democrats underestimated support for those policies by between five and nine percentage points.
But even though Democrats had a better understanding of where voters stand than Republicans did, they too were biased to the right. So while Republicans are doing a whole lot of wishful thinking or willful denial or just plain not caring what voters think—about 13 points worth—that’s not the only thing going on.
The study offered some disturbing answers.
First, aides who reported more reliance for policy-making on business-oriented interest groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the American Petroleum Institute, had a poorer understanding of constituent preferences than did aides who relied more on groups drawing their membership from the general population, like the Sierra Club or the League of Conservation Voters. Of note, those business-oriented groups tend to support conservative policies, which could explain some of the aides' conservative bias in their estimates.
Second, the researchers found that aides in offices receiving more money from corporate interests did a worse job of estimating constituent preferences. In fact, “45% of senior legislative staffers report having changed their opinion about legislation after a group gave their Member a campaign contribution,” according to the paper.
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Not only that, but when staffers were asked to imagine getting a letter from “employees of a large company” in their district, they were more likely to say they’d see it as representative than if the letter just came from a plain old constituent.
So: congressional Republicans really, really want to believe that voters are far more conservative than they really are, but congressional Democrats don’t understand how popular progressive policies are, either. Money and lobbyists are a major force making that happen. And congressional offices take people more seriously if they’re connected to major companies. Maybe for the cynical among us there’s nothing too surprising there, but it’s an important way to understand American politics—and it may contain some clues for pushing back.