Townspeople and Politicians

The Wall Street Journal ran an article earlier this week about how Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) managed to win reelection in one of the closest victories the Republicans managed in 2018. There's a lot of interesting stuff in that article; a lot of it makes me question whether very many other Republicans will actually be willing to lean towards the center in the same way. I think the answer is "not many"... but that's not actually the point I want to focus on.

The one detail I am going to focus on is from this quote:

One lesson of such tours is that Capitol Hill is a bubble. At a taco joint in conservative Castroville, Mr. Hurd asks a breakfast group for their thoughts on the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and the table gets pretty quiet. That subject is remote compared with a future bypass on U.S. Route 90. “What people talk about in D.C. is different from what people talk about here,” Mr. Hurd says in the car afterward. “Man, Khashoggi has dominated Washington, D.C., for a month. None of them brought it up.”

While I can see the point the author's going for, that reads a whole lot to me like "these people are too deep into their own bubble to realize or care about what's going on in the wider world". It's kind of ironic that they have exactly the same problem, in that sense, that we're complaining about everyone in Washington DC having.

To be fair, that doesn't rule out the idea that both groups are stuck in their own bubbles - and politicians not capable of understanding what their constituents are going through is definitely a worse problem to have than the reverse. But it's important to remember that the voters can have that problem too, particularly if we want to have politicians that can help lead the country rather than just blindly following the currents of public opinion.