For years, countless scholars have posited the role of constituency and party pressure on legislators’ roll call voting records. Indeed, though popular estimates of legislators’ preferences come from roll call data (e.g., NOMINATE or ADA scores), most scholars are careful to note that these are not necessarily measures of ideology per se but rather of legislators’ revealed preferences—that is, they reflect both legislators’ ideological commitments as well as the influence of party and constituency. In this paper, we offer robust evidence that legislators’ roll call records may be closer to their preferences than once thought. Using a novel survey of former members of the House of Representatives, we leverage the severing of the electoral connection and lack of institutional party pressure to show that legislators’ preferences as measured by NOMINATE scores (Poole and Rosenthal, 1997) closely mirror their own perceptions of themselves. Additionally, employing the Aldrich and McKelvey (1977) perceptual scaling algorithm, we demonstrate legislators’ sophistication in their ability to identify the ideology of important American political actors.