[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/does-yo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
Voting is actually the least effective means of democratic change (It is more effective then sitting at home, and complaining.) The second least effective means of democratic change is getting other people to vote. The most effective means of democratic change is picking the candidates that will be in the running - before voting happens - which can largely be done with dollars.
[1] https://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/does-money-really-buy-el...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
There's also the tried-and-true strategy of paying off both candidates, so that regardless who wins, they'll be beholden to you.
The "maximizing profits" trope simply doesn't explain why oil and gas has such an outsize influence. If profits are what mattered, the tech sector would have tremendous influence, but it doesn't. It doesn't, because unlike oil and gas it doesn't employ tons of non-college workers in swing states, and the cost of their products doesn't hit everyone in the wallet once a week. Profits are secondary or tertiary at best.
I agree that these kinds of supports (to certain industry sectors) don't always do all that much to maximize their profits (short, let alone long).
The real reason behind them is their symbolic effect. It's the idea of a limitless (and infinitely exploitable) "frontier" -- and the inherent, sacred right of private capital to manage that exploitation, unfettered by regulation -- that they seek to defend with these actions. (That, and the repudiation of basic science on general principles of course).
That some of their donors (who as I'm sure you know will individually benefit many magnitudes of order more than individual consumers will from the temporary increase in economic potential) is a nice plus (icing on the cake) as it were -- but it's not the main driver.
You try to skirt around the issue saying the profits are maybe being passed down the consumer more than one thinks, ok valid. But the point still remains that everything that is being done is to maximize short term profits / cut short term consumer costs.
>policies that make oil and gas products cheaper popular with voters not just popular with "business elites."
Well.. so what? Of course 95% of people would generally say "MAKE THINGS CHEAPER!" That doesn't mean it should be done.
Besides, you are also making it sound like more people would rather have cheaper gas than a long-sustainable environment. Not so sure you are right on that one.
That's not it at all. It politics, not ideology.
The fossil fuel industries in the US are huge. They employ millions of people.
But those industries are rightly under attack for causing climate change and generally destroying the environment. If we did the right thing and priced carbon and prohibited pollution then they would be uncompetitive. Those forms of energy would cost more than solar or nuclear or something else and those people would lose their jobs.
Which is what needs to happen, but did you really think they'd go down without a fight? Any politician who wants to win an election in those districts is going to be under pressure to take the "screw the environment to save the oil industry" position. It happens that the oil and coal deposits are disproportionately in red states, so that's where those constituents live and those are the politicians saddled with that voting block.
This is a different motivation than an ideological preference for actual deregulation, which would have them e.g. refusing to regulate the tech industry rather than calling for some ridiculous anti-encryption nonsense.
To get rid of it you need to do one of two things. One option is that when the other team gets in they need to do a better job of completely smashing those industries into smithereens so they no longer represent a powerful constituency (e.g. Obama could have done this but didn't), but they pay a short term cost for doing that. They'd almost certainly lose the next election because in the short term the people whose jobs you just destroyed are going to be angry and resentful. You also run the risk that after you lose the election the other team comes in and undoes what you did.
The other option, and this is the really great one, is that you also pick some evil constituency of the other team and have everyone get together and destroy them both at once, so that politically it cancels out. But that requires a level of bipartisanship that isn't currently very common. It's everybody doing something which is good for the country even though it yields no partisan advantage, and that's not really how modern politicians think, so how do you get it to happen?
Besides, post-2016 it appears the business elites have switched sides.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...
It all comes down to their ideology, which in a nutshell comes down to: maximizing profits and (perceived) short-term gains for its core constituency (i.e. business elites) - and where that's not quite possible, at least keep the illusion of an every-expanding, anything goes "free market" system chugging along for another year or two -- at the expense of everyone and everything else -- and all common sense to boot.