Comment by PaulHoule
1 day ago
Some of the Trumpiest voters are "evangelicals who don't go Church". On the other hand there is the strange case of the Mormons who have made Utah one of the reddest states in the nation although it has low levels of dark personality, inequality and corruption whereas my state of New York is the opposite. (Louisiana in the other hand is red and dark and Vermont blue and light)
I have a lot of respect for the values of many Mormons such as Steven Covey but boy does it drive me crazy that they pulled out of supporting the Scouts when the Scouts opened up to gays.
People have numerous reasons for voting the way they do, I know from conversations that there were people who weren't thinking from a "always blue" or "always red" frame but saw the last election as a comparison. They saw Trump and Harris as bad alternatives and picked the one they thought was least bad. Overall the college-educated voted for Harris and others voted for Trump. The argument that "Trump is bad for democracy" wasn't as salient for people as "Harris is ineffective".
I consider myself liberal but not leftist. I can see why so much of the country was turned off by Democrats during the last election. You had more center left and center right candidates before 2016.
The modern MAGAs would have called Reagan a “RINO”.
Back in the 1990s we complained that we couldn't get anything done because of "Blue Dog Democrats" [1], now we can't get anything done because there are only 10 of them.
For that matter, I moved to New York in 1990s when we had a Republican Senator Al D'Amato, a Republican Governor George Pataki, and Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani to be replaced by Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Personally I think one party rule is a bad thing because it makes it hard for us to vote out corrupt politicians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition
I kinda blame the fact that, after zooming out to national or party level,
(Otoh this is mitigated by my observation that, e.g., liberal christians are recognized by the influential on the right to be prosocial-- and by themselves to be basically pro-institution.)
This is why you need a Mamdani to convince the center-left that it's not divisive to do so (& it's great that he's prioritizing the economic marginalization angle)
With Harris there is another mixed signal independent of her stage skills: swingvoters cannot decide if she is pro-or anti-institution (support from people like Powell-Jobs is counter-productive)
(Aside: let me know if that was confused)
As mentioned by Ezra Klein, Trump is a moderate-- my additional take is that he is intentionally so. Due to dark traits he knows to kayfabe extremism-- this provokes the divisive elements on the voting left, but the politically influential on the right do not see this as anti-institution
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> On the other hand there is the strange case of the Mormons who have made Utah one of the reddest states in the nation although it has low levels of dark personality
LDS forbade Black people from participating in the ordinances of its temples until 1978.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormonism
True. But a lot of institutions in America had anti-black policies that they've changed.
Mormons have a reputation of being sexist, there is evidence for that, Salt Lake City has the highest rate of cosmetics consumption in the US. However...
I used to give blood and to make it more interesting I toured all the places where the Red Cross set up centers, and one place was the Mormon Temple. Usually you don't see a lot of women giving blood, not least because they don't make as many red blood cells as men. I saw at least as many women giving blood as men there and, I don't know anything about them, but they were not having the kind of "tradwife" conversations that "hippie mamas" have in Ithaca, but were talking about international travel, business, volunteering and all sorts of adventures. They may well have been tradwives but they were certainly not just tradwives.