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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]i agree that idiocy, culture, and ignorance play into this a lot.

But I've always thought there was more nuance to the question of why do poor states vote so GOP when GOP policies are so bad for the poor.

The US (and WVA) have pretty low voter turnout. Only 63% in WVA.  Voting correlates with income and education; the more income and educaiton you have,  the more likely you are to vote.  The poor have pretty low voter turnout.

So imagine in WVA you are the guy who finished 2 years community college and has gone to your shitty job at Walmart every day for 5 years and now you're manager and making $22 an hour.  Your income still sucks but.... you're likely above the line of getting any government social programs (no medicaid, SNAP, housing support etc). You probably have enough money to live  in an area not completely ravaged by environmental ruin. You also probably vote. Now you look around your shitty state, and you're surrounded by drop outs, drug users, people having babies with multiple kids, people who are perpetually unemployed, don't even bother getting jobs, people in and out of jail. Like, run of the mill red state poverty. Of course, dcum readers know that there are a lot of institutional and other factors that result in that kind of poverty; but there's also obviously an element of free choice as relates to poverty (and whomever cracks the nut on where outside vs inside factors come into play on poverty should be a billionaire, but i digress....). So you're the guy getting up every to your crappy walmart job for $22 an hour for years surrounded by a lot of poor people who are not doing the same. And your experience and exposure to those poor people makes you more inclined to vote for policies that will hurt those poor people.  And the poor people, as mentioned above, aren't actually voting at all.  Like, the person who is making $8 an hour at walmart and not moving up the wage chain -- they've probably got some issues going on if after a few years they're not moving up the employment chain -- so i'm guessing that person is not a voter at all.  And when i'm a rich person in NOVA who has almost no exposure to poor people, my support of govt policies that help them is entirely theoretical (based on what i read in the news and my knowledge that poor people exist and need help).  But when you're a middle class worker in UVA, your knowledge of the poor is very tangible. And that direct exposure may in fact make you far less sympathetic to poor people and the govt policies that help them.

In other words, instead of asking "Why do poor people in poor states vote for policies that hurt them?", I'd assume that poor people in poor states who benefit from the main govt programs (medicaid, SNAP, housing) mostly don't vote at all, but the higher number of poor people in poor states makes the working middle class and above (ie the people who do vote, and who do not benefit from medicaid, SNAP, housing) less sympathetic to poor people and the policies that help them.  Hence, you end up with MORE people in red poor states voting against govt programs that help the poor non-voters in their states.

Obviously, working people benefit from other govt programs that may be impacted by Trump or not, but those are buried deep in the details -- and the average american (rich, poor, educated or not) doesn't really understand nor vote on those issues.

But main point: If i'm working class in WVA and surrounded by a bunch of (to me) unemployed lazy bums who use drugs and don't bother showing up to work half the time and then coast on unemployment for 6 months, I might be inclined to vote for Trump too.  Exposure to poverty probably makes the non-poor less sympathetic to poverty. [/quote]
It's not just about poor people.  If you read the article, the community would've benefited from the billions in Biden's infrastructure bill to WVA, and that was killed by Trump.   This bill wouldn't just help the poor, but the state in general. Yet, WVA still strongly supports Trump.

Also,  even small business owners who supported Trump have had to close up shop due to his tariff policies, and they still support him.  These people are neither poor nor completely "uneducated".

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/north-carolina-man-voted-trump-131500350.html

Explain that one.   The only explanation I can come up with is that they are brainwashed  cult members.[/quote]

PP you're responding to.  The infrastructure bill - that's exactly the kind of complicated benefit stuff that i meant when i said people aren't voting for it. The fed govt pays for all kinds of big things, they take years to implement, any while they may provide overall benefits to your community, any individual person may not be able to discern a qualitative or quantitative improvement on their own life. Five years later and business in your shop is doing well? Was it the infrastructure program? Overall federal economic programs? Or just because you've been working twice as hard and made some savvy business decisions? Who knows. Literally. You're just an anecdote.

Tariffs are a bit weirder, and i think a few things are at play. One is total ignorance about how tariffs work and regular people just having a "gut" feeling that putting a tax on chinese companies is good and will help american companies.  There is plenty of news in the conservative sphere that's been arguing that for the last year.

But ultimately i think a middle class business owner is willing to take the gamble on tariff policy (per above, because they are maybe 50/50 on whether they think it will actually hurt them) and they'll take that gamble in order to definitely see benefits taken away from the poor people around them. Again - back to my example with the guy at walmart who's worked hard and been promoted to manager.  He listens to Fox, Fox has made some convincing arguments for why tariffs may not be all doom and gloom, so maybe there will be some impacts on Walmart sales but maybe not.  But what he does know is that 80% of the people he hires to work for him show up late half the time, come to work on drugs, and get fired after a few months, and their families are propped up on govt support in the long run.  And he is very, very in favor of stopping programs that help those people, so he votes GOP.  And the poor people working for him don't vote at all.

It's actually not an unreasonable world view point. It's not how I vote, and it doesn't align with my views and sympathies. But i don't spend a lot of time around the chronically poor. If i lived in a state that was full of chronically poor people and i myself was only a step up from chronically poor, i could see how human logic could result in less sympathy for those chronically poor. [/quote]

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