(Reminder) "Study: Congress literally doesn't care what you think"

[LearnedHand]

This article has been posted here before, but I am so full of rage that the Dems don’t have OUR backs that I thought I’d remind us whose backs Congress does have.

https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

Have you ever felt like the government doesn’t really care what you think?

Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a simple question: Does the government represent the people?

Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.

SNIP

Does public opinion affect the political process? Gilens & Page found that the number of Americans for or against any idea has no impact on the likelihood that Congress will make it law.

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” — Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics