About a white rural voter...

[Slammer]

46. "How does a con man like Trump manage to fool an otherwise intelligent, big hearted man like this?"

Most people aren't deliberately monsters. They don't want what's worst for the country. They don't have a huge burning hatred for other racial groups. They don't want poor people to be deliberately screwed over.

What they've seen is decades of political insiders running the country with the country not getting better and in many ways getting worse. What they want is the country to get better.

But the vast majority of people don't pay attention to politics until it's almost literally shoved in their faces.

Most people don't know enough about economics or public policy to be able to evaluate policies to tell whether they would be good or bad. And you can make almost anything sound good to someone who has no way of evaluating whether your statement is accurate or not.

Most people also don't know enough to be able to identify a good source of news from a bad source of news. And they can't tell when a news story isn't being put in an accurate context. They can't evaluate what isn't being said by their news source. And they have no context for economics, public policy, or politics to figure out why something is happening or is being done. If they pay attention to the news at all, most likely they're only finding out that something happened and aren't being exposed to why it's happening, much less being able to figure out why without someone else pointing it out to them (and the person pointing it out to them might or might not know what they're talking about and might or might to choose to be telling the unvarnished truth).

So...you get a heck of a lot of people who are drawn to a political outsider because political insiders haven't been able to fix things or seem to be actively making things worse. Over the years we've seen movements of ordinary people to figures like Ross Perot...and more recently Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders.

A lot of people went directly from "Ron Paul for President" in 2008 and 2012 to "Bernie Sanders for President" in in 2016 and 2020...without seeing any contradiction despite the fact that Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders couldn't be further apart on their political views.

And when Bernie didn't get the Democrat nomination in 2016, some people went from "Bernie for President" to "Trump for President" without seeing any contradiction...because both seemed to be political outsiders...and because those people didn't have the skills to evaluate proposals and weren't involved enough in paying attention to politics to actually read the proposals being made by each candidate.

People make the decision of who they support based on

Does he "talk tough"?

Does he talk about whichever issue interests me? (regardless of whether his proposal is actually feasible to implement or would work if implemented)

Is he strong on national defense (defined as "does he talk like he wants a strong national defense", not whether his policies would create a strong national defense)?

Is he physically attractive or does he look like a possum?

Is the candidate the correct gender (regardless of which gender is considered by that voter to be "correct" )?

Is he running in the correct party?

And once some potential voter decides to support a candidate, they start self-filtering the information they receive about that candidate. Things which are negative about that candidate are downplayed in their minds regardless of how serious the negative happens to be. Things which are positive are magnified in their minds beyond how important the positive factor is.

And that happens because doing anything else would mean admitting that their own decision was wrong. Humans are pre-programmed to avoid coming to that conclusion. You need some level of training or discipline (whether from an outside source or self-taught) to be able to step back and look at something objectively to evaluate accurately whether you yourself screwed up or not in making your decision.

So people are inclined to follow their candidate, regardless of who the candidate might be, further and further down whatever rabbit hole the candidate wants to fall down. They aren't getting accurate information from wherever they're getting their information. They have no skills to be able to evaluate whatever information they do get. And their brains are pre-programmed to accept and magnify positive information and to reject negative information.

For some people, at some point, reality starts to intrude to a degree which they can't ignore. But the further down the rabbit hole someone goes, the more pointed reality has to be before it effectively penetrates their self-constructed bubble.

Sorry that I can't do a "tldr" version. That is the extremely condensed version.