Farmers Vote

That's what I've always said when explaining why we still have direct payments in the farm program, and apparently, that's what researchers have found out:

To measure what influences lawmakers’ farm policy votes, Carnes and Bellemare tracked down sets of data that they thought could indicate important motivators, such as a legislator’s personal policy preferences (the researchers looked up which officials had once managed, or owned, a farm), the number of voters in a district that would benefit from the policy, and the size of the campaign contributions that legislators had received from agriculture industry groups. The researchers write that, of course, the longer a legislator had been a farmer, the more farmers a legislator represented, and the more money a legislator received from farm groups, the more he or she supported legislation trumpeted by organizations such as the American Farm Bureau Federation.
But Bellemare and Carnes went a step further—they looked at the relative importance of each factor to figure out which one held the most sway over legislators. They found that the relationship between the three factors—a lawmaker’s background, the electorate, and industry group—is where things get interesting. For every control case, the number of farm worker constituents within a congressperson’s electorate outweighed the influence of interest group spending and lawmaker background. To be sure, the amount of money a legislator received from political action groups, and the years he or she spent corralling pigs and the like, did correlate with more support for bills that protected agriculture interests. But the number of farmers in a representative’s district was tied the closest to a representative’s farm policy votes.
Media and food activists like Bill McKibben have been known to blame tendentious lobbying efforts for a heady farm bill. But it turns out voters in farm states or districts could be the most important drivers of legislators’ decision-making.

I was telling a guy that last week, and he was getting really pissed at me.  He didn't get that I was mocking the system, but he'd also had a few.