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Comment by tspike | Hacker News Reader

Republican legislators are pretty uniformly against net neutrality. The Republican public is not, with one recent poll showing 3 out of 4 Republicans familiar with the issue voicing opposition to the rollback of regulations. [1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12...

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And yet they still vote for candidates with known public positions that are contrary to their own!

That's because they prioritize fighting a culture war... Over a minor issue like NN.

Would you suggest they not vote?

There is no candidate that does not hold policy positions contrary to at least some my own.

What they've done is decided that this issue is less important than others, and based their votes on that.

> Would you suggest they not vote?

Of course not. As you say, it's clearly not a significant issue for most Republican voters.

However, I think a lot of voters assume that the party reflects the values of the voters though - clearly that is not always true.

That's because you don't get to choose your issues one at a time. You get to choose a basket of issue positions at the same time as a legislator's personality. Normally from a choice of two.

> You get to choose a basket of issue positions at the same time as a legislator's personality.

And this is at best -- it assumes your elected representative even holds their campaign promises, which is maybe a long shot.

Indeed. However, most politicians take their election as a mandate for all of their public positions.

Yes. Mandate theory is a convenient fiction with basically no basis.

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