if living in russia taught me anything, people in distress reduce themselves (and got reduced) to the most basic questions, like who is to blame, and populists have them like a piece of cake.
Most vatniks, not unlike MAGAs, don’t have answers to many questions, they want to be left alone to manage the hole they happened to be born into, and the promise of a candidate or ideology that does just that or even paints their quest as a herioic one, or a sacred sacrifice, would win again and again until there is someone to work with that and educate them.
They are used to live in shit and depend on themselves, don’t know anything better and become pretty jealous if others get that. Others having it worse, especially their ‘enemies’, kinda makes their own living more bearable. Their struggle is a downpainment for a mission of punishing the unworthy ones.
When a person is downscaled to that childish level of consciousness it’s impossible to reach them with rhetorics that don’t directly benefit them.
As long as they continue to be like that and their thoughts are unchallenged, they’d always vote maga.
I haven’t seen an analysis from your perspective before. Lines up very well with my experience from the Southern US.
Really well said
And as they continue to vote against their own interests it becomes a self-perpetuating system.
Another way to view this is that the poor are voting republican now. Trump won those making less than $100,000 handedly while Harris won those making above. Probably because he’s offering them a solution to there problems, deport the immigrants and bring manufacturing back. His plan is dumb and won’t work but at least he’s putting something forward unlike Harris who says everything will stay the same.
The democrats are slowly becoming the party of the out of touch elite, and memes like this don’t help. The democrats need to be putting forward solutions to those problems, and trump has shown it doesn’t matter if they’re viable or will actually help. If these “dumb poor people are rubes who will fall for anything” give them something to fall for. Say your going to tax the billionaires at 50% and use that money to pay for Healthcare and child care, don’t cozy up to them so you can raise another billion dollars to lose another election .
Say your going to tax the billionaires at 50% and use that money to pay for Healthcare and child care, don’t cozy up to them so you can raise another billion dollars to lose another election .
That was basically Harris’ tax plan.
What Would Kamala Harris’s Tax Plans Mean For You? | Kiplinger - https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/kamala-harriss-tax-plans-2024
It doesn’t matter what your platform is if it’s not communicated effectively to the median voter
Time is a circle.

when is it from?
About 1974. Massachusetts was the only state to not vote for Nixon during his re-election and the bumper stickers appeared after the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation only a year and a half into his second term.
Maybe they voted against the incumbent so overwhelmingly because things are hard.
People vote based on their feelings.
When they were feeling pain, the message from the Dems was about how great the economy was, but the reality is that the stock market and GDP don’t speak to the quality of life of these people. To them the Dems saying how great things were was dismissive of their real concerns.
Meanwhile, Trump latched onto their fears and concerns. Yeah, his policies are idiotic, and millions will suffer and be in worse shape. But when they said they couldn’t pay the mortgage or buy groceries, he listened. The Democrats didn’t because they’ve abandoned the working class that should be their backbone.
Maybe they voted against the incumbent
I wouldn’t be so confident about assigning such motivation.





