Tuesday Open Thread [4.23.13]

Of course we all know that our Democratic congressional delegation has for a long time assumed that Delaware was a more conservative state, or at least its residents possessed a more conservative politics, and hence there was a need always for a Democratic candidate to always always moderate their message and move to the right (and this applies more so to Carper and Carney, and less so to Coons). And now we have statistical proof of this phenomena. David Broockman and Christopher Skovron looked at legislators’s perceptions of their constituents and compare to estimates of the the actual issue attitudes of people living in their districts.

There is a striking conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions, particularly among conservatives: conservative politicians systematically believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are by over 20 percentage points, while liberal politicians also typically overestimate their constituents’ conservatism by several percentage points. A follow-up survey demonstrates that politicians appear to learn nothing from democratic campaigns or elections that leads them to correct these shortcomings. […]

These findings suggest a substantial conservative bias in American political representation and bleak prospects for constituency control of politicians when voters’ collective preferences are less than unambiguous.

If you want to know the one reason why Republicans will never allow immigration reform to pass, even though every national pundit says it is necessary to modernize the Republican Party’s brand so that it can ever again win a national election, Politico tells us…

“The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.”

“Key swing states that Obama fought tooth and nail to win — like Florida, Colorado and Nevada — would have been comfortably in his column. And the president would have come very close to winning Arizona…. Mitt Romney, by contrast, would have lost the national popular vote by 7 percentage points, 53% to 46%, instead of the 4-point margin he lost by in 2012, and would have struggled even to stay competitive in GOP strongholds like Texas, which he won with 57% of the vote.”

This is really a conundrum for the GOP. Pass immigration reform and have the electoral landscape shift dramatically in favor of the Democrats. Don’t pass immigration reform, and cement the ever growing Obama Coalition / Democratic advantage among all non-whites for all time, and thus not be viable in national elections for the next century.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a new Public Policy Polling survey in South Carolina’s 1st congressional district finds Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D) leading Mark Sanford (R), 50% to 41%.

51% say the revelations about his trespassing last week give them doubts about his fitness for public office. Interestingly, the events of the last week haven’t hurt Sanford too much with Republicans though- 65% say the trespassing charges don’t give them any doubts about him, and his favorability with GOP voters has actually improved from 55/39 a month ago to now 61/32.

So Republicans approve of creepy lawbreakers.