This is why my neighbors voted for him.
1. Illegal Immigration.
2. Inflation.
3. Second Amendment.
4. Federal judicial picks.
5. Peace with Russia / get rid of all the war-mongering neocons.
6. National debt.
The above is most of it in a nutshell. But let me try and put the correct framing on it in light of everything else in your post..
The way I see it, and I believe this is true for most, liberals, conservatives and independent. There are primary and secondary motivating factors for voting
For the average conservative/Republican leaning voter, and a good sum of the independent voters Inflation and illegal immigration were the biggest motivators and the primary motivating factor for them. This makes total sense to me. As these are issues that are personal and affects their everyday lives. The cost of things matter to most people who are barely scraping by.
For conservatives who are politically inclined - ( I.e the types of people who'd come on threads like this or bring up politics in everyday discussions) Federal Judicial picks, Second Amendment fears, and the fight to save the life of the unborn are very important. So are issues of foreign policy, the wars abroad and Americas funding of parts of them. These types of people are a minority though. They are consistent voters but a small %. And their issues are mostly secondary motivators for the larger voting electorate.
For Independents (and this is backed by data, so not my opinion )what motivated them primarily to vote decidedly Republican were the issues of Transgenderism, DEI, and Critical Race Theory. The effects this was having in their places of work and in their children schools. Again, a primary motivator because it was personal. Their jobs, their lives, and those of their children were directly impacted by this new wave of philosophies.
As for the average liberal (again according to research) the motivating factors were mostly what to me seemed on average secondary motivating factors. 1. Threat to Democracy, 2. Character of the candidates, and 3. Abortion being the most highlighted reasons.
I admit, right to abort is one that can be deemed a primary motivating factor. The others aren't really. They are secondary.
So it's not surprising that people will vote more on primary factors than they will on secondary factors.
Granted, if everything was going to be equal no matter who you voted for, sure secondary factors like the character of the candidate might come into play for the average American, but everything else isn't going to be equal. One wants to aggressively shut th border down, the order spent 3 years pretending it wasn't an issue. One wants to clear out DEI practices in Govt and in Schools, the other publicly promotes it
Giving that the potential outcomes are drastically different, why would the average citizens limit their choice to the character of the candidates? This pretends their admins will do exactly the same thing. When clearly they won't.
This, ' but character ' argument is so strange... By the way, it's not like the other candidate has a sterling character. It's just that they've concluded it's not as bad... Anyway
There is nothing strange or crazy about this election. It was so basic and annoyingly obvious how it was always most likely to go... I pointed this out several times before the election. The surprise results would have been a Harris win.
Frankly, I think the results were closer than the trends suggests it should have been. This is probably is due to how poor of a candidate Trump himself is...
But the factors on the ground were so decidedly against the Democrats that to use Foggy's words " a ham sandwich" was likely to defeat the Democratic candidate. Especially in light of how poor the candidate was and how much they disregarded the very thing they claimed to want to protect the most in selecting her.
Anyway, thanks for your analysis. It covered a lot. And hopefully you are a messenger some might listen to. I clearly fall mostly on deaf ears.
