One of my TikTok followers, Patrick, sent me an unexpected direct message on Tuesday — and it stuck with me:
“I’d love your thoughts on how well our representatives are actually representing the views of their constituencies.”
Representative democracy is meant to ensure that elected officials translate the will of the people into law — not the will of their donors, party leaders or personal ideology. It’s what we were promised as children. But now that we’re adults, how relevant are We, the People, in today’s politics?
The thought reminded me of a recent MSNBC segment featuring Senior Political Analyst Matt Dowd on the importance of town halls.
Last March, the NRCC chair privately advised his Republican colleagues to halt town halls, arguing that they “play into” the antics of alleged “professional protesters.” As a result, lawmakers have largely avoided face-time with their voters — and it’s become increasingly clear that they’re misunderstanding what policies are popular and which are incredibly unpopular.
Without these in-person check-ins, the voices filling the void aren’t always voters’ — they’re the donors, lobbyists and Super PAC’s whose access to lawmakers is unlimited. It was these networks, from the anti-abortion legal machine behind the Dobbs decision to the corporate lobbyists shaping Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (to name a few of the most controversial policies in recent years) that provide far more persuasive to lawmakers than the people actually living in their districts.
To Dowd’s point, town halls can tell you a lot of critical things about a region’s political climate. But in today’s day-in-age, liberals share articles on Bluesky, conservatives own the libs on X and the most loyal Trump-supporters flatter him on Truth Social. And if users can’t fathom a legitimate disagreement to their point, just think about their representatives. Living in their own ecosystem, they might log online and unknowingly dive into a sea of affirmation, or — depending on the day — hate.
On Wednesday, Nebraska state senator Mike Flood — in a moment of either courage or delusion — faced his constituents, which wasn’t pretty. Perched among a sea of 700 of his home-town electorate, he was relentlessly criticized over his support for Trump’s megabill.
60 percent of Nebraska voters cast their ballot for Trump last November, and before the Senate passed his spending bill in May, a whopping 50 percent of Americans opposed it with only 29 percent of the country’s support. Still, it passed — and millions of Americans have been bracing for impact since.
“Progressive policies — by and large — are very popular in this country. Exceedingly popular,” Dowd said. “But you have a segment of the Democratic party that keeps trying to convince progressives that we’re losing elections because their policies need to be more moderated. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Take New York’s Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, for instance. Trump called him a “100% communist” (an old-timey nod to the Red Scare) and Democrats worry his overt-progressivism will walk him right into political purgatory — but the latest polls show that his favoritism far surpasses all of his opponents.
“So progressive policy is not the problem,” Dowd said. “It’s the communications to people’s hearts and guts that’s the problem”
Politicians push policies despite widespread public opposition, and voluntarily weaken the impact of legislation in fear of it’s failure. The next political awakening in the United States might just be realizing that its politics have been pulled disproportionately right — landing far more conservative than where constituents are actually standing on the political spectrum.
“The Democratic party’s not a Left party,” New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez asserted during an MLK Jr. panel in 2020. “We can’t even get a floor vote on medicaid-for-all — not even a floor vote that gets voted down.”
In spite of the low-approval rates of Republican-led legislation, they get enough votes — Post-Dobbs “trigger laws,” social security and medicare cuts, criminalizing marijuana, net neutrality rollbacks, refusal to expand medicaid, Trump 2.0 ICE raids — and are often considered too conservative even by the majority of Republican voters’.
Trump, who boasted about "being “able to kill Roe v. Wade after 50 years of failure,” called his opposition, “radicals that are willing to kill babies even into their 9th month, and beyond.” Despite the confidence his delivery carries, the polls show that its persuasion was ineffective. The dramatic landmark ruling reflected a mere 46% of Americans’ support — the updated survey reflect that only 38% of Republicans are in agreement with Trump’s stance.
Ultimately, it’s time politicians find the courage necessary to represent their constituents. So long as there’s hope for representative democracy, We, the People, demand they represent less of what they think America wants and more of what America actually wants.