Our model considers a majority election between an ideologue committed to a fixed policy and an idealist candidate who implements the ex-post socially optimal policy. Voters are aware that their individual rankings of policies may change after the election according to common or idiosyncratic shocks. We show that in the unique symmetric informative pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, the ideologue often beats the idealist, even when this choice hurts all groups within the population. Inefficiency arises both for sincere and for strategic voters; we also show that it is more pervasive in the latter case.