I keep asking myself, why do some people vote against their own interests!

[akbacchus_BC]

Are all republicans rich that they do not need social security or medicare, are the people in Appalachia well off, do they vote republican?

Aren't some republicans on welfare and on the so-called Obamacare? Why are these people voting against their own interest? I keep asking myself, how could so many people elect a person who does not care about them!

Look at the people trump is nominating for his cabinet, he is not draining the swamp, he is emboldening the swamp. If people are not scared yet, I have no idea when they will get scared. Unless he has them mesmerised and his bus tour will galvanise them to support him even more.

[akbacchus_BC]

2. The thing is, she embraced some of Bernie's policies, she advocated for them and in my heart

I knew she would have served the American people well. Her loss is very tragic, sort of changed how other leaders see the US.

Trump is not going to do what he promised, we know that from his Goldman Sacs pic. Four years and he is gone! That's what am thinking but he will break America so much that another President will take more than four years to put it back together.

Four years is a long time under a dictator!

[akbacchus_BC]

6. I cannot argue with you on that, however, Bernie pulled her a little bit to the left, which is good.

Even after all her promises, the fuckers voted for a clown!

Let's see if he keeps his promises to the people who voted him in.

[oldtime dfl_er]

3. good q

I must have read 100 articles in the last couple of weeks on why people voted for the orange anus. None of them satisfies this question. People are angry. People are stupid. People "hope" he won't do what he says he is going to do. People don't like Hillary's face.

In the end, it comes down to that formula I saw once in a cartoon -- FEAR + IGNORANCE = HATE.

[akbacchus_BC]

5. Not only that, the polls pundit fooled us.

I was banking on SOS Clinton winning that I never thought trump would win. How could the polls be so wrong?

And I was relying that history would repeat itself, after President Obama, Americans would embrace a female President. To be honest, am still in shock that a retard is in control of your country!

[hamsterjill]

28. I think that's it.

With a very BIG emphasis on ignorance, at least in my area of the country, being Texas. Many Trump supporters that I've spoken with have absolutely no concept of things that do not affect them directly. And by directly, I mean, something that slaps them in the face. They have NO concept of the world at large.

[andym]

7. They are more concerned with having greater opportunity and having "freedom"

So the social safety net is of secondary concern. They want to have better paying jobs and have been taught to believe that the government robs them of freedoms. Since they believe in the private sector and have been taught to distrust government, they believe the GOP claims that the reason they have problems finding good paying jobs is that the government prevents business from succeeding and is stealing their freedoms. So they vote GOP. The power of GOP ideology is strong.

Now they don't realize that they really getting the freedom to starve or be sick, or that removing regulations just allows corporate malfeasance and does not produce jobs. Lowering taxes on the rich and corporations also has only minimal impact on quality job creation. In fact more freedom allows the jobs to leave more easily to places with less costly workers. So they are really voting against their interests, while believing they are voting for them.

Trump however partially breaks the GOP freedom spell, by saying that freedom (free trade) can do damage-- it's a direct populist assault on traditional GOP ideology, and we will see how that affects the parties and the electorate. But with the likelihood of the dismantling of the safety net, many of the poor GOP voters are going to be in for a big surprise when the services they need are no longer available and the new high paying jobs do not materialize.

[akbacchus_BC]

8. Thank you. How could trump supporters not see he was lying to them? Were they so bad off before?

Look at the people he is picking for his administration, they are not going to help working class or middle class people.

[andym]

9. Why do people continue to buy cars from used car dealers with abysmal reputations?

because they are hoping they get lucky-- with predictable results.

[akbacchus_BC]

11. Because they are silly. If you look at some of the court cases on TV

the sale is as is. No compensation.

But this is a country at stake, and I cannot understand how so many people could be fooled to vote for an imposter! He is a liar, a cheat and a TV personality. Are Americans so gullible to fall for that shit?

[andym]

14. Yes Americans are gullible enough

and ignorant enough to fall for a liar and a cheat. Take a look at this blog

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/10/the-dance-of-the-dunces-trump-clinton-election-republican-democrat/
"OK, so that just happened. Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated, low-information white people. As Bloomberg Politics reported back in August, Hillary Clinton was enjoying a giant 25 percentage-point lead among college-educated voters going into the election. (Whether that trend held up remains to be seen.) In contrast, in the 2012 election, college-educated voters just barely favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Last night we saw something historic: the dance of the dunces. Never have educated voters so uniformly rejected a candidate. But never before have the lesser-educated so uniformly supported a candidate. Trump supporters might retort: “That’s because Trump supports the little guy and Clinton helps the already privileged college grads.” But that’s false: Trump supporters in the primaries had an average income of about $72,000 per year. They aren’t rich, but make more than the national average and more than Clinton supporters.

Trump owes his victory to the uninformed. But it’s not just Trump. Political scientists have been studying what voters know and how they think for well over 65 years. The results are frightening. Voters generally know who the president is but not much else. They don’t know which party controls Congress, what Congress has done recently, whether the economy is getting better or worse (or by how much). In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, most voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than George W. Bush, but significantly less than half knew that Gore was more supportive of abortion rights, more supportive of welfare-state programs, favored a higher degree of aid to blacks, or was more supportive of environmental regulation.

Just why voters know so little is well-understood. It’s not that people are stupid. Rather, it’s that democracy creates bad incentives."

[SpareribSP]

10. What IS the matter with Kansas?

Thomas Frank -

Even more alarming for Democrats were the stark implications of “Kansas” for their grand strategy of “centrism.” As I tried to make plain back in 2004, the big political change of the last 40 years didn’t happen solely because conservatives invented catchy conspiracy theories, but also because Democrats let it happen. Democrats essentially did nothing while their pals in organized labor were clubbed to the ground; they leaped enthusiastically into action, however, when it was time to pass NAFTA and repeal Glass-Steagall. Working-class voters had nowhere else to go, they seem to have calculated, and — whoops! — they were wrong. The Kansas story represented all their decades of moderating and capitulating and triangulating coming back to haunt them.

Maybe I concealed it too well, but this critique of the Democrats was supposed to have been one of the book’s big takeaway points. It was fun to mock the culture-war fantasies of the right but in doing so I also meant to challenge Clintonism. Yes, it had worked wonders in fundraising terms, but in forswearing the economic liberalism that appealed to working-class voters, it brought them electoral disaster. Again, the proof was all around us, in all the embarrassing defeats of those years, not to mention the needless capitulations like Al Gore’s in 2000. The bland centrist style that Democrats held so dear was political poison. To beat the right, I argued, they needed to move left.

From 2014. Awfully prescient today - http://www.salon.com/2014/02/16/the_matter_with_kansas_now_the_tea_party_the_1_percent_and_delusional_democrats/

[akbacchus_BC]

12. Not sure what you are trying to say! Sorry!

[SpareribSP]

13. A bit of backstory

Thomas Frank wrote What's the Matter With Kansas? which explores the phenomenon of people voting against their own interests. I linked and quoted a followup piece where he talked about it ten years later in a follow-up piece in Salon. It's an interesting take.

[BumRushDaShow]

20. One of the problems with that Salon critique

is not looking at why a Clinton happened in 1992 (with the birth of the DLC in the late '80s). And that was because "traditional" liberal stalwarts Carter/Mondale lost in 1980 (amidst an internal squabble with Ted Kennedy) -



Mondale/Ferraro lost in 1984 -



and Dukakis/Bentsen lost in 1988 -



http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/elections.php

The prevailing thought was to attempt to bring the "Reagan Democrats" back into the fold (and counter the Lee Atwater "Southern Strategy&quot .

The home region of both Clinton and Gore was "the south" (Arkansas and Tennessee), and that helped to harvest a demographic of voters who had been Democrats (Dixicrats) but who had voted for Reagan. But the unfortunate result was to also bow down to the corporations to garner additional financial support and help to pick off additional demographics of Reaganites, in order to barely tip the scale to the D column.

One can "Monday Morning Quarterback" the past but it then goes into the soul searching of what the party represents and unfortunately there are constituencies within the current Democratic party that are the subject of abject hatred by large swaths of the American population.

The bigger problem is being able to keep the focus on common issues and adequately respond/retort to a guaranteed GOP invoking of the usual divisive "culture wars", which continually derails conversations that focus on "shared interests". But doing this must acknowledge the fact that there will always be a segment of the population (who were very much present under Reagan as well) who are "single issue" voters ("single" actually a collective noun for "cultural issues" that come out of religious beliefs). These "single (culture) issue" folks were actually "bilked" by the previous 3 GOP Presidents, out of having their agendas enacted, after being heavily courted by the GOP (i.e., the GOP had to pivot away from them to deal with the rest of the nation and the courts due to the unconstitutional "culture issue" demands).

This go-around, Drumpf dog-whistled to a new group - a group that had actually never been as overtly courted by Reagan or either Bush as was done this election cycle. And this was in order to not only bolster the "religious right" demographic, but to counter the newly empowered Democratic demographics who had propelled an Obama to office TWICE. I.e., they had to expand their voting demographic to include the deplorables in order to counter a new "blue wave" of Hispanics.

[Bigredhunk]

15. -

:large

[Bear Creek]

16. Anthropology

They believe that against all odds that they will be rich or in a place of power. That they will get to behave that way. That they will get to be Tump or Mnuchin or the the obnoxious boss.

[Amimnoch]

17. Why do people buy lottery tickets?

Even more so for demographics that have less disposable cash to do so?

Even though all applied logic would tell a person that they are going to be the loser for their political capital purchase through their vote, there's the hope that they will be the person who wins a prize from the purchase.

[Bear Creek]

18. The swamp

Everyone just thought he was talking about DC. He was really talking about poor and working people. He wouldn't even wipe his shoes off on us.
But the problem is Most of the republicans I know, the hate for other people is so great that they vote even if it hurts them more. Then there is the whole cultural and church indoctrination that only certain people should be in power. Don't question what they think is best for you and of course they are going to save babies. The country has an infant mortality rate of a third world country and that the US lead in maternity deaths. The democrats need to frame the conversation they are the pro life and family values party and the republicans are the ones for death and tearing families apart with their policies. Then there is just that most are low intelligence or spark.

[kebob]

19. ...

[EffieBlack]

21. They're not voting against their interests

Yes, they may be voting against their economic interest. But they have other interests that override that particular one and they are going all in to protect them.

[Fresh_Start]

22. I saw something that they are not voting against their interest

they are voting against what we think is their interest

the have a substantial interest in social ranking (thus the150 year long civil war)...and in any way making other people equal to the whites is a real threat to their social ranking.

[NRQ891]

23. 'they are voting against what we think is their interest'

such as NAFTA, MFN-China, TPP, H-1b visas.....

[Fresh_Start]

24. such as increased minimum wages, right to unionize, healthcare,

investments in education, infrastructure jobs.


BTW, the GOP passed NAFTA, the majority of the democrats in congress voted against it.
The GOP supported increases in H1b visas,
The GOP supported TPP
.....

And those voters supported the GOP so they elected government that voted for the items you listed

[NRQ891]

25. 'BTW, the GOP passed NAFTA, the majority of the democrats in congress voted against it. '

'BTW, the GOP passed NAFTA, the majority of the democrats in congress voted against it. '

Clinton's VP Gore debated Perot on it - Clinton signed it

'The GOP supported increases in H1b visas, '

Clinton signed it, and Hillary is on record supporting increases

'The GOP supported TPP'

as did Hillary, until Bernie came on the scene

'so they elected government that voted for the items you listed'

both parties supported it

[Fresh_Start]

29. President Bush negotiated NAFTA with Mexico and Canada

You so realize that the president only sign the bills right? The Congress writes the bills...so for any bill signed by Clinton, the Congress passed it...and in all the cases you are listing the congress was a GOP controlled congress

[NRQ891]

30. is it wrong to interpret VP Gore's debate with Ross Perot on CNN as support from Clinton?

[napi21]

26. The mmore reasons I heasr about why so many people voted for the Con, the more I'm

convinced they wanted CHANGE! They didn't care what kind, they just waste change I've lost count of the number of people, when asked "Why did you vote for him?" The first thing out of their mouth is CHANGE! Some have a lot of little reasons, but they pale in comparison to just change.

I wonder how long it's going to take before we start hearing "Not THIS kind of change?"

[marybourg]

27. They are misled about what IS their interest.

They think it's in their interest to have the rich (>$5.5 mil for singles, $10 mil for couples) pay no estate tax when they die. Why? Because they've been misled into believing that if they're lucky enough to be left their parents $90,000 house or a great-uncle's $200,000 stock portfolio they're going to have to pay a "death tax".

They get their news from one-line on the hour news bulletins and RW talk; maybe cable; they don't read anything. It's easy to mislead them with a word or a meme.