I've lived in the deep south for a number of years. Problem is you're both right. Problem is there's a diverse set of opinions and it depends who you're going to come into contact with.

I'll say that I know quite a number of people who claim to be stout libertarians (a very common stance in the south and especially in Texas) and even be much more supportive of legalizing all drugs because "government bad, personal choice good" and "government shouldn't be a babysitter." YET I've seen those same people vote for those politicians. I've seen those politicians run on those platforms and then push such agendas and then people not really care about it. Not too different from the old "I didn't speak out because I wasn't x, but then there was no one left to speak for me" quote.

Truth is humans are full of hypocrisy, for better or worse. Some of this is so we can handle nuance in an approximate way without having to invest in the computation/effort to resolve those. It is a real thing though and we need to be nuanced to deal with it, including how we discuss it.

BUT there's also a clear and measurable phenomena where politicians are not acting as good representatives. You can find many polls on things like Marijuana laws, government provided health coverage, government pension plans (cough social security cough), paid family leave, corporations not paying their fair share of taxes, wealthy not paying their fair share, complexity of taxes, return free filing, and many other things. You can find Pew and Gallup polls on this stuff running back for years, showing majority approvals. The issue, is we quibble over nuance AND oversimplify the nuance. We often pretend that the optimization functions are the same or identically conditioned. Often the difference is coming down to a focus on positive rights vs negative rights in the conditioning of the linear program. Abortion might be a good example. Liberals try to minimize the harm while conditioning on the liberty of the mother while conservatives tend to have the inverse approach. Essentially liberals will give up liberty of the unborn in favor of the currently living while conservatives are willing to give up liberty of the currently living for the unborn. You cannot maximize both liberties of the living and the unborn at the same time, there has to be a trade-off. Both want surprisingly similar things, but we frame them as extreme opposites because we are not discussing the nuance and we're arguing while we work from a different set of base assumptions assuming that the other persons are operating under the same assumptions. Which makes it quite difficult to actually understand the other person's goals and intentions.

Thing is, people are happy to prey upon this complexity and difficulties in communicating. Knowingly or unknowingly. We are often unwitting players in this as it is so easy to get trapped into the mindset that others operate under the same premise that we do. Until we understand this, we are going to have extreme difficulties in communicating. Even if we want the same things and even if we want extremely similar outcomes. I'm sure many people here have had a "stupid argument" where you realize that you and the person you're passionately arguing with are on the exact same side, just expressing your views in different ways. It's often embarrassing and we laugh about it because we __are__ fucking idiots. Yes, this includes (especially) me. Don't listen to me, I'm a fucking idiot.