As our elected putative representatives have, over the past century or so, completely gerrymandered the congressional districts to be mostly safe zones for one party or the other’s incumbents, incumbency rates are generally steady above 90% for national elections. Because of this, each member of the House is probably only interested in pleasing his or her “base” party faithful, rather than some hypothetical constituency which may actually contain people with whom the base disagrees. For example, here in West-By-God Texas, nobody gives even the slightest lip service to any Democratic Party followers or liberal/progressive issues. Everything is about the conservative agenda, and who among the political class is hewing most closely to the Platonic ideal of perfection. What Democrats do run are obviously only serving as a token sacrifice, as they have no chance whatsoever of beating the 80% GOP voting record. Heck, many of the local offices don’t even have a D on the ballot; we may have more Libertarians running than Democrats.
Might this be part of what led to the current theater taking place in DC regarding the debt ceiling? The GOP House members don’t have to make any noise about compromising what they claim are their principles, even though nearly 80% of the USA says they should. They don’t need to worry about that because we don’t have a national general election for those seats – each of those individuals only has to play to the base back in the gerrymandered district. This means that only primary elections matter, so proving you can work with The Other Side is completely irrelevant. There is no other side, as far as it matters when re-election time comes.
This strikes me as being one really messed up way to run a government.
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