Money talks. The donor class needed 8 dems to end the shutdown and turn on the money fountain again, and they got them. If they had needed 25 dems to cave, they would have gotten 25. If it was (somehow) critical to maintaining their wealth that 40 republicans vote for the “Trans and Immigrants are Actually The Best Bill”, then 40 republicans will vote for it. Congressional outcomes have nearly nothing to do with voter preferences, you can look up studies on exactly how that has become totally desynced the last century, especially since Citizen’s United.
Money talks. The donor class needed 8 dems to end the shutdown and turn on the money fountain again, and they got them. If they had needed 25 dems to cave, they would have gotten 25. If it was (somehow) critical to maintaining their wealth that 40 republicans vote for the “Trans and Immigrants are Actually The Best Bill”, then 40 republicans will vote for it. Congressional outcomes have nearly nothing to do with voter preferences, you can look up studies on exactly how that has become totally desynced the last century, especially since Citizen’s United.
Citizens United is where this country really went wrong.
Can you do some leg work for us and link a study or 2?
This is probably the most famous one, all the way back from 2014! https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
And here’s an OK video on the study (more biased than the study itself but very easy to understand): https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig
And this study contains a lot of great links and references if you want to go deeper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379421001256