In adopting new policy, do policymakers respond only to the opinions of the richest American citizens, ignoring the rest? High-profile political science research suggests that the likelihood of U.S. national policy adoption is strongly related to the share of the richest citizens who support the policy, but—after taking the richest citizens’ opinions into account—is unrelated to the opinions of the middle class. We revisit these findings arguing that the disproportionate influence of affluent citizens is not uniform across policy proposals but is concentrated in foreign policy and in the largest proposed shifts from the status quo. Instead of archetypal inequality-increasing proposals like high-income tax cuts and deregulation, the disproportionate influence of the affluent comes primarily in extra support for consensus foreign proposals like international agreements. Instead of slowly influencing small policy changes behind the scenes, affluent preferences primarily block high-profile large policy changes. The rich do have stronger influence than the middle class on policy adoption, but they succeed mostly in supporting global engagement and avoiding large-scale shift in policy. Our data enlarge Martin Gilens’ dataset from his book Affluence and Influence, reviewing more than 1,800 policy proposals before the national government since 1981, but adding original information on the policy subtopics and ideological direction of each proposal.