CT Blue

Some news from the Department of Why am I not surprised by this. It seems that politicians of both the the right and the “left” believe their constituents are far more out of touch with their own self interest than is actually the case:

When we compare what legislators believe their constituents want to their constituents’ actual views, we discover that politicians hold remarkably inaccurate perceptions. Pick an American state legislator at random, and chances are that he or she will have massive misperceptions about district views on big-ticket issues, typically missing the mark by 15 percentage points.
What is more, the mistakes legislators make tend to fall in one direction, giving U.S. politics a rightward tilt compared to what most voters say they want.

Not surprising, in a way. But startling. The typical conservative candidate in their survey overestimated the district's conservatism by 20 points. The typical liberal candidate overestimated the conservatism by around 5 percentage points.

via Daily Kos

Now, there are probably a lot of reasons for this, including some mentioned in the Daily Kos article, but surely one of them is the gravitational influence of money. Politicians of both the “left” and right, intentionally or unintentionally, conflate their contributors with their constituents. Republicans owe fealty to the most extreme of the rich, the Koch brothers and others of their ilk, while the Democrats take their marching orders from the Wall Street types who don't mind if people get health care (so long as the profits go to them) and are generally supportive of the liberal position on social issues. In both cases, the interests of the large contributors are significantly to the right of the base in both parties, not to mention the public at large. The so called “liberal media” helps, of course, by perpetuating the meme that this is a “center-right” country, despite what the polls may say.

I suppose we can take some comfort from the fact that the Democrats are far less deluded than the Republicans. On the other hand, the Republicans are far more aggressive at demanding and delivering what their fantasy constituents want than are the Democrats.