Republican voters are mismatched with their representatives, but never seem to care.

Here in Wisconsin, a small but definite majority of Republican voters are in favor of legalized THC, and the issue is popular overall. The Republican congress refuses to even consider it.

At the federal level, look at what Republicans in congress have done about gun control. Oh, yes, they’ve stopped things like universal background checks, but their voters would also like things such as removing silencers from the NFA list (which doesn’t exactly ban them, but makes it inconvenient and expensive) or repealing the Hughes Amendment (ban on all new registrations of automatic firearms since 1986; existing ones were grandfathered in). Connecting to the issue above, there’s also broad support for removing the drug question off the ATF background check form 4473 for buying a gun, which the ATF insists you must say “yes” to and have the sale denied if you use THC, even in legalized states.

There’s been bills submitted for some of this, but they aren’t going anywhere. I think they’re waiting on the courts to strike down much of this for them, but congress could just do it.

Bigger point is that Republicans don’t do things for their voters. GOP voters also seem uninterested in holding their own representatives to account. As long as their representatives are hurting the right people, their voters don’t care.