Why Congress is Out of Touch

And how politicians from Abraham Lincoln to Katie Porter manage(d) to be different

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) said something important this week. “Too often, Congress recognizes issues too late,” she told Sarah Ferris of Politico after giving an emotional speech to her fellow Democratic House members about how inflation was affecting her family. Porter is a single mother of three who commutes back and forth from California to DC every week, and despite her congressional salary she’s feeling the pinch. She added, referring to inflation worries, “I had a colleague mention to me, ‘We’re not seeing it in the polls’ … Well, you don’t know what to ask,” she replied.

“We’re not seeing it in the polls.” The fact that most Members of Congress are addicted to polling and use survey data to decide, well, almost everything they do is one of the dirty little secrets of modern politics. And the problem isn’t just that polls only show what a pollster chooses to ask about. Or that the way a question is phrased, or where it falls in a list of questions, can twist results.

It’s that polls themselves are not proof of anything. Public opinion is more fluid than most pollsters like to admit. And rather than slavishly following public opinion, people with big megaphones (like politicians, or Supreme Court…