People’s political behavior frequently does not match their rhetoric.

I understand the temptation for GMAT students to study LSAT problems, mostly because of the huge amount of official LSAT material available (there are almost a hundred full-length official LSATs, comprising over 10,000 questions in total, available for purchase).

If you're going to use LSAT material, though, you should always ask yourself "How would this problem work/look if it were on the GMAT?" Almost every LSAT problem would need some kind of 'adaptation' to be GMAT-relevant—if indeed it can be made relevant at all (lots of LSAT problems cannot).



This problem asks for the role played by one specific statement in an argument. In this case, there's a ready analogue on the GMAT: the 'boldface statement' CR problem type.

But, even though the analogy is unusually close, the problem statement and answer choices don't look like their counterparts on the GMAT. When you study this kind of problem, it's imperative to consider how to map it onto a GMAT-like template.



THE QUESTION:

In this problem, nothing is boldfaced; instead, the content of one sentence is repeated in the question 'stem'.

The GMAT would instead put that one sentence into boldface and remove the specs from the stem:





SOLVING THE PROBLEM:

In my experience, most students find it very helpful to give the speaker/narrator a name and try to imagine that she/he is LITERALLY SAYING these things, in language that wouldn't be out of place in educated but casual conversation.
Also, if your native language is other than English—and especially if most of your spoken conversations happen in that non-English language—you may find it helpful to translate the statements as you go (if you're able to do so fairly efficiently).

If you do these things, then you ought to find it much more intuitive to grasp that:
• the FIRST statement ("People’s political behavior frequently does not match their rhetoric"—however you 'translate' this) is a GENERALITY;
• the LAST statement ("voters often reelect politicians whose behavior they resent") is ONE EXAMPLE of that general principle;
• the BOLDFACED statement ("Although many complain about government intervention in their lives, they tend not to reelect inactive politicians") combines with the following statement to 'PROVE' / SUPPORT' the example in the last sentence.



THE ANSWER CHOICES:

These don't look at all like the options on GMAT boldfaced-statement problems. They're full of specs, whereas the GMAT options are invariably phrased in terms of more generalized abstractions.
In cases such as this—where there are marked differences between the two tests—it's crucial that you try your best to 'adapt' at least the correct answer, and ideally the wrong ones too, to GMAT conventions.

The correct answer says
It is a premise offered in support of the conclusion that voters often reelect politicians whose behavior they resent.

The GMAT doesn't put specs in the answers for these problems, so let's sub out that colored part—whose role is noted above (under "solving the problem").
It is a premise offered in support of one specific example of a general principle.
(Mentioning the general principle here is of the essence! The GMAT would almost certainly do so, because the general principle—stated in the first sentence—is the main point of the entire monologue. The correct LSAT answer, by contrast, makes no mention of that first sentence at all.)

Finally, GMAT boldfaced-statement answers tend to include the narrator's judgment—i.e., whether the narrator agrees or disagrees with some point (or neither, as in the case of factual background statements).
Including that part, we have
It is a premise offered in support of one specific example of a general principle that the narrator asserts.

That's a GMAT-like correct answer.

It's okay if you don't make every single transformation that I did here. What matters is that you can recognize and make some of the necessary changes, and that you come away from the exercise with a better and more precise understanding of the various conventions followed by GMAT problems.