Brookhaven Town Democratic Committee

msnbc:

Louisiana has the highest gun-murder rate in the country. Yet state lawmakers have pushed an aggressive campaign to loosen the state’s already lax gun laws. A coalition of Republicans and white Democrats has banded together to fight gun control efforts of a small minority of mostly black legislators. MSNBC.com’s Trymaine Lee traveled to Baton Rouge to tell this story.

(Source: thebadgerman619, via current)

upwithchris:

A fascinating new working paper from two political science graduate students published this week finds that politicians tend to overestimate just how conservative their constituents are. Conservative politicians are especially bad at gauging their constituents’ beliefs — they underestimate support among their constituents for policies like universal health care and same-sex marriage by as much as 20 percentage points.

These findings explain so much about the state of modern American politics. There seems to be such a larger appetite for conservative policies like war and austerity among politicians than among actual voters. In the latest budget fight, for example, politicians on both sides of the aisle have been insisting on the need to cut spending and “entitlements.” But polls show consistently that Americans believe spending cuts are bad for the economy, that they want to reduce the deficit through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts and that they want to preserve funding for cherished social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security.

This disconnect between politicians and constituents has, arguably, gotten worse over the past three decades. As shown in the graph above, the share of Americans describing themselves as “conservative” has remained largely unchanged since 1976, even dipping considerably in the 1990s. House Republicans, meanwhile, have become more conservative than ever before, according to the DW-Nominate scale, a system of rating the ideology of lawmakers devised by political scientist Keith Poole.

The striking divergence between how conservative Congressional Republicans have gotten and how conservative the American people are explains so much about how broken and dysfunctional our politics are.

(Source: upwithsteve)