A long-standing line of research attributes criminal legal policy outcomes in America to policy attitudes held by the public. For these scholars, one possible mechanism driving this relationship is a punitive public electing punitive politicians. This article presents new evidence demonstrating that citizens’ criminal legal policy attitudes do not directly translate into their electoral choices. We use three conjoint experiments to demonstrate this disjunction. Our first two experiments demonstrate agreement about which classes of offenders are more deserving of release. This agreement generally holds for Democrats, Republicans, and respondents at all levels of racial resentment. However, when respondents were asked to choose between hypothetical legislative candidates promising to release these same classes of offenders, the consensus breaks down. In a hypothetical electoral context, partisan and racial resentment-based divisions intensify. These findings suggest that the translation between criminal legal policy attitudes and electoral preferences is not straightforward.
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