Red County And Blue County Realities

The realities of life in conservative leaning (red) parts of the United States are different than in liberal leaning (blue) parts of the United States. Roughly speaking, these distinctions play out not so much at the state level as at the county level. This post explores some of the differences in lived realities for people in blue counties compared to red counties that helps to explain their stark political differences in the U.S. as part of a more cohesive narrative that can help build understanding about their true causes. Of course, even this rather lengthy list is far from comprehensive.

Economic Productivity and Population Density

Per capita GDP in blue countries is roughly twice what it is in red counties. This is huge!

The population density in the inhabited parts of blue counties is much higher than the population density of red counties and "purple counties" which are evenly balanced between liberal and conservative leanings, tend to have intermediate population densities which are often suburban.

Ski resort towns and other counties with tourism based economies (e.g. greater Las Vegas) often have low population densities when crudely comparing permanent residents to the land area of the county, but have large swaths of land where no one lives with small dense resort style housing areas which house many seasonal residents in addition to permanent residents.

The link between economic productivity per capita and population density isn't accidental. One of the most consistent empirical laws of economics is that higher population density leads to greater productivity which makes it possible to pay higher wages and necessary to do so in a competitive employment marketplace. It holds true across cultures, across geographical regions, and across thousands of years. It has been true all of the way back to Jericho and Sumer and the Nile River Valley and the Indus River Valley to the present. It was true in the pre-Columbian Americas in North America, in Mesoamerica, and in South America.

Transit and Electric Vehicles

Public transportation is more cost effective and provides better service in higher population density blue counties than in lower population density red counties.

Red counties also have longer average motor vehicle trips than blue counties, because people are spread out further from each other, and longer average trip lengths (and longer peak monthly and annual trip lengths) disfavor all but the very latest electric vehicles relative to gasoline and diesel vehicles.

Housing, the Cost of Living, and Wages

The cost of living is much lower in red counties than in blue counties. This is mostly driven by lower housing costs in red counties (both renting and owning) than in blue counties relative to median wages, and by lower business real estate costs in red counties relative to blue countries that indirectly impact retail prices.

Lower housing prices in red counties mean that homelessness is much less of a crisis in red counties than in blue counties.

The pressure to increase the minimum wage is greater in blue counties where the cost of living is higher than it is in red counties where the cost of living is lower. A "living wage" in a blue county is higher than the "living wage" needed to maintain the same standard of living in a red county. 

Slower home price appreciation in red counties than in blue counties also means slower property tax increases over time.

Lower home prices in red counties also mean that red county homeowners who have owned their homes for many years have much less wealth in the form of home equity than blue county homeowners who have owned their homes for comparable periods of time.

A lower cost of living also places less pressure on red county residents to set aside savings that build wealth, than blue state residents who know that they need to save money to be able to afford a security deposit or down payment for a home, to afford education for their children which is critical for a blue county child's future income, and to afford other major purchases. Of course, lower incomes also make it harder to save money.

But with little home equity if they sell their homes, and less savings, and a higher cost of living in blue counties relative to incomes for less educated and less skilled worker wage premiums in blue counties, many residents of red counties are basically trapped there. They can't afford to move to a blue county even if they'd like to do so. The jaws of the trap are even tighter for red county residents with no blue county residents who are no longer working and are on fixed incomes.

Blue counties have higher housing costs because their populations tend to grow faster than the housing supply as people move their for their larger number of jobs that pay better than in red counties. 

About half of red counties, if not more, are losing population while their housing stock remains more or less the same, and even those red counties that have growing populations are growing slower than blue counties, so it is easier for the construction industry to increase the supply of housing enough to keep up with the slowly growing population. Moreover, in many red counties, populations have been declining, stagnant, or at least below the national average, relentlessly, for decade after decade pretty much starting in 1960s and almost every decade since in the last sixty years. Indeed, the percentage of the population engaged in farming has declined for almost every single decade from the 1790s until into the 2000s. These long slow declines undermine even hope for an eventual recovery or stabilization.

Since housing prices in red counties seem likely to fall, or at least only keep up with inflation, this also makes investing in maintaining and improving homes in red counties a bad investment. In contrast, in blue counties with every soaring real estate prices, keeping a home well-maintained and up to date with renovations and improvements can yield disproportionate returns, causing the existing housing stock in blue counties to be in better shape and more up to date.

More educated and skilled workers make much more income in blue counties than in red counties, which more than makes up for the higher cost of living there. Less educated and skilled workers also make more income in blue counties than in red counties, but not enough to make up for the higher cost of living there.

Tighter economic circumstances and economic stagnation in a community, also fosters zero sum game thinking, and eats away at empathy as taking care of your own becomes your priority. All potential forms of competition, from international trade, immigration, female workers competing with male workers, and non-white workers competing with white workers, all starts to look like a threat in this mindset, whether or not this is true. And, older white men without college educations, in particular, who are the core of the MAGA movement have seen their demographic's economic prosperity decline in relative terms to lots of other groups (even if it has not actually meaningfully declined even after adjusting for inflation and their own costs of living are low), through events taking place mostly in their own lifetimes.

Fertility

It is more expensive to raise children in a blue county with its higher cost of living, than in a red county. So, families in blue counties are smaller, with fewer children in response to those realities. Blue county children are also more likely to need and benefit from expensive higher education (which red county voters don't want to support funding for since higher education confers a much smaller benefit to them than it does to the children of their blue county peers).

The expansion of economic opportunities for women also greatly increase the opportunity costs for all women, in blue counties and red counties alike, of having more children. This opportunity cost has caused the number of children per woman per lifetime to fall particularly fast for less educated women who previously weren't qualified to be teachers or nurses, and had few options other than being house wives, but can now work in a variety of less skilled jobs previously held predominantly by men.

This has made the "trad wife" ideal unattainable for most families, but especially those consisting of non-college educated couples with lower incomes who need two incomes just to support themselves and one or two kids. But when women are less economically dependent upon their husbands and often have steadier and better paying work than their husbands, then families are less tight economic glue holding them together, and a provider man's position as "head of the household" is undermined.

Nostalgia

In a red county that has been stagnant or in decline for half a century or more, nostalgia for the "good old days" can be intense. High school educated people used to have incomes proportionately much closer to those of college educated workers and managers, even if the absolute buying power of those workers hasn't actually fallen, and this has gotten steadily worse since the early 1970s. In contrast, blue county college educated men have seen uninterrupted prosperity (and a lot more men have college educations now than in the 1970s). Women have seen their access to higher education and to more remunerative employment in non-traditional professions soar. Minority members are much less shut out of the top levels of the career ladder than they were in the 1960s even if they haven't reached parity, improving in relative terms. High school educated men have stagnated, in part, because of the structure of the economy (it is important to recognize that the two and a half decades after World War II were a remarkable one time only exception that can't be reproduced for the most part, and not the norm), and in part, because the average was being pulled up by smart, socially functional men who had no access to college educations then and now have gained college educations leaving their less bright and more difficult peers behind in a new economy. 

Civil rights aren't a zero sum game, but it is easy for a high school educated man prone to feeling aggrieved for economic reasons to see it that way, and women and minorities have secured a lot of civil rights that they once lacked. 

Smaller and less stable families for all but billionaires or near billionaires, it seems, has also undermined and narrowed the role of men as fathers of many children, something was was commonplace for middle class men in the Baby Boom era (although people forget that this time period was also one with much higher poverty rates than those of today until the "War on Poverty" rebalanced the status quo a bit).

The patriarchy has weakened, and they are the heirs of the patriarchy. So, of course, they yearn for the good old days, even though that was facilitated by key factors that can't be recreated with new policies.

Unions

The union narrative of the left is that unions brought us the weekend, the 40 hour work week, overtime, workplace safety, employer provided health care, and more. And, this isn't wrong. But it is incomplete.

Unions facilitate turning the economic power of workers into concrete economic gains for them in an efficient manner. But this facilitation and negotiation and political action related role only works at times when the demand for the labor of the unionized workers is great and the supply is smaller.

When there is a glut of less skilled, less educated workers, because the economy has been transformed to be less labor intensive, through automation, for example, and because other countries long ago restored the manufacturing capacity that was destroyed in World War II and no longer need to import manufactured goods to the same extent, unions don't provide workers with much in the way of concrete benefits because they don't have much to negotiate with. 

Likewise, part of the shortage of workers during the Baby Boom was because women left the work force en masse to have kids (a desire deferred during the Great Depression and World War II which were times of great scarcity), reducing the supply of workers and leaving the men who  re-entered the work force after World War II in greater demand with more economic power. This also won't recur. The many men who died or were seriously injured in World War II also shrunk the supply of able bodied adult male workers in the U.S., which is certainly not something we would like to repeat.

This, in a nutshell, is why private sector labor unions have declined steadily until just a few years ago (when worker economic power and demand was near a prolonged record high also accompanied by prolonged record low unemployment). For decades they couldn't deliver. And, since the labor market is weaker in the less productive red county economies, unions are even less effective in red counties than they are in blue counties.

Employers never like unions, but in red states, there isn't an intense worker desire to protect unions because they provide minimal benefits there, so the legal balance has tipped against unions in red states with things like "right to work laws", while in blue states, where the strong economy gives workers more power and unions more to bargain with, the balance between unions and management legally and politically has been more stable, because unions in blue states can deliver more to workers who therefore have a more intense desire to support them politically against employer attacks.

Religion

Being religious provides few economic and educational benefits to college educated upper middle class people, and can be a hinderance. And, it provides only modest economic and educational benefits to working class girls. But it provides great economic and educational benefits to working class boys (both black and white).

Religiosity is also strongly associated with uncertainty in life, especially economic uncertainty. Less educated people, on average, are at much higher risk of unemployment and prolonged unemployment during their working years. Farmers and fishermen are also subject to great uncertainty in their economic prospects due to factors like weather and the availability of fish from year to year than even "middle skilled" workers in blue counties and "urban farmers" (who work in truck gardens or indoor marijuana grows).  So, people in red counties are more likely to see religion as more important in their lives even controlling for whether they are religiously affiliated or not.

Red counties (especially in the South, in Utah, and in other Mormon dominated counties) have a far greater percentage of Christians with far less denominational variation than blue counties. Red counties are far fewer religious non-Christians (e.g., Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists) than blue counties do. So, religious diversity is not part of the everyday experience of residents of red counties.

Family Stability

The same economic instability and uncertainty, and lack of economic prosperity that makes red county residents more religious also dramatically influences their family stability.

The biggest predictor of whether a cohabiting couple will not marry, or whether a married couple will divorce, in basically every culture, is whether the woman in the couple earns more in the cash economy than the man. And, men without college educations, who make up a disproportionate share of men in red counties, are much more likely to have sustained periods of unemployment and to have mediocre earnings that have been stagnant, adjusting for inflation, for decades, than men with college educations (or even "mid-skilled jobs" and some college) in blue counties.

Also, high school educated women who leave the work force to have kids for a while receive few, if any, economic penalties to their earning capacity when they return to the work force, while college educated women who do that see their earning capacity when they return to the work force plummet. And women in red counties are much more likely to obtain some level of post-high school education than men. Indeed, programs to help women improve their education and skills often succeed in improving the economic well being of women, while programs to help men do the same rarely attract interest from men or have much of an impact.

As a result, couples with high school educations are failing to marry (the average high school educated couple has a child two years before getting married while the average college educated couple has a child two years after getting married and does so at an older age), and getting divorced when they do marry, at unprecedented high rates (in white couples echoing trends that started to appear with black couples without college educations in the late 1960s, as discussed for example, in the Moyihan report at the time).

In these breakups and divorces, where the inability of the man in the couple to be the stronger economic provider in the relationship is a key cause of the breakup, the man also has little if any ability to pay child support and alimony, or to provide a significant property division settlement (i.e. the legal rights a woman gains from being married).

The economic struggle that high school or less educated couples have to stay employed and earn a decent income after decades of wage stagnation for high school educated workers, also makes these families much more vulnerable to situations where they neglect or abuse their children, often resulting in a termination of parental rights or just child protective service intervention.

Both unstable couples, and neglect/abuse situations, means that many red county children often grow up without their father as part of the household for prolonged periods of time (echoing the experience of African-American children half a century earlier).

These trends are also exacerbated by the trend towards assortative marriage. There are fewer marriages in which one member of a couple is college educated and higher earning and the other is not college educated and has lower earning capacity. In part, this is because people have long tended to marry people of similar IQ, but now higher IQ women obtain college educations, while historically, this was much less common.

So, red county families are vastly more fragile than blue county families. This has led to a perennial state of moral panic in red counties about masculine identity and "family values" which when viewed as a moral problem prompts an attack on perceived sources of immorality and lost of masculine identity, which has led red county men to try to express their insecurity about their masculinity by trying to display that in ways other than being an economic providers, and by scapegoating LGBT people.

In contrast, college educated couples, who are much more common in blue counties, are much more likely to marry before having children, and have divorce rates that are falling to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Higher Education

In blue counties, higher education programs at all levels from certificates to associate's degrees to four year college degrees greatly increase your earning potential and pay for themselves in as little as a year or two, and usually in less eight years for all but the least qualified students in the least technical programs.

In red counties, higher education programs other than four year college degrees are a net money loser even at low community college tuitions when living at home, and even a four year degree can take as much as twenty-four years to pay for itself with higher earnings.

This is fundamentally because urban areas with healthy economies have productive ways to utilize the skilled and abilities developed in college, while rural and small town economies don't have jobs that productively utilize what someone learns from a college education.

See here and here.

Immigration

Blue counties have greatly disproportionate shares of immigrants and, in particular, disproportionate shares of immigrants who are settled residents of their communities rather than migrant workers living semi-nomadic lives. Due to their familiarity with immigrants in their daily lives, residents of blue counties are much less afraid of immigrants, who they know from experience to be good community members (at least to the same extent or more than native born members of the community) and who they know from experience are not disproportionately likely to commit crimes.

Red countries have a disproportionately smaller share of immigrants, who are often limited primarily to medical professionals and migrant farm workers. Due to their lack of familiarity with immigrants and the lack of a healthy economy, red county residents are much more likely to fear immigrants. Attitudes towards immigrants and globalization is also influenced by the reduced likelihood of red county residents to have had any higher education (as discussed above), or to have travelled abroad or to have lived in very different places within the United States (as discussed below).

Travel and Migration

Residents of red counties are much less likely to have a passport or to have traveled abroad than residents of blue counties. They are also less likely to have spent significant amounts of time living in places in the United States other than the vicinity of the place that they grew up, and even when they have lived elsewhere are likely to have lived somewhere else quite similar to the place that they grew up.

Studies of cousin marriage have shown that people in cousin marriages are less economically successful on average, primarily as a consequence of being less likely to leave the community where they grew up to move to larger cities.

Race

Some counties are overwhelmingly white, and those counties tend to be red counties that are rural or small town settings, especially in Appalachia, the rural Midwest, and much of the mountain states. The main exceptions are in New England (e.g. rural and small town areas in Vermont and Maine and Western Massachusetts) and counties defined by college towns.

Counties that are majority non-white tend to be blue counties even if they are similar to red counties in other respects, these include most of New Mexico and parts of Southern Colorado, counties with Indian Reservations (from Oklahoma to Arizona to North Dakota), and much of rural Hawaii and Alaska.

Quite a few red counties, however, are biracial. They have a white majority, and a non-white minority, usually black in the South and the Rust Belt, usually Hispanic in the Southwest, and sometimes Native American in countries near Indian Reservations and in Alaska (in the case of Alaska Natives) that don't actually have Indian Reservations or Alaskan Native communities. Few red countries, in contrast, and many blue counties, are genuinely multiracial, with significant numbers of people from more than two races or ethnicities.

Age, Health Care, Disabilities, and Credit

Residents of red counties tend to be older than residents of blue counties (except that Mormon dominated red counties tend to have younger residents).

Blue counties have more specialized and higher quality medical care available, and more medical professionals per capita than red countries which have a greater need for medical care due to their older populations. Blue states also tend to have fewer people who are uninsured since unlike some red states, they don't intentionally turn away free federal funds for Medicaid expansion and mostly don't provide state funding for health care beyond the federal minimum contribution. 

Red county residents have less interaction with medical professionals, especially medical doctors, than blue county residents, and a greater proportion of medical doctors in red counties are foreign born than in blue counties, which can impair the quality of doctor-patient interactions and communication.

Red county residents are less likely to have good health care outcomes following trauma incidents and strokes than blue county residents since they are less likely to reach a trauma center or top quality hospital during the "golden hour." More generally, red county residents have less first hand experience with what top quality modern health care can accomplish, on average, than blue county residents.

Red county men in the work force are much more likely to be employed in jobs with highly elevated rates of occupational injuries (like farming, fishing, timber work, mining, and construction) than blue county men in the work force.

A greater proportion of workers in red counties have physically demanding jobs that make it far more common for these workers to become disabled or forced to retire at younger ages than in blue counties.

Higher percentages of the population that are uninsured, and general lower levels of economic security among high school educated people who are more common in red counties also mean that average credit ratings are much lower in red counties than in blue counties, and that a very substantial proportion of the population in red counties have money judgments outstanding that can cause their wages and bank accounts to be garnished and their property seized, which can build animosity towards the legal system, and distrust of law enforcement officers who enforce judgments and of financial institutions in red counties. In blue counties where economic prosperity is more often uninterrupted and adequate health insurance is more common, in contrast, credit ratings are higher, money judgments are much more rare, and trust in the civil courts and financial institutions is much greater. Lack of health insurance also breeds justifiable fear of interactions with the medical establishment which can lead to financial ruin for many red county residents, while it rarely has that effect for blue county residents.

Self-Respect and Fragile Self-Esteem

The non-college educated white men at the core of the MAGA movement have taken immense blows to their self-esteem in many cases, and if they haven't have seen friends and neighbors who have.

The fact that they didn't go to college or went and didn't graduate brands them as a failure. They have failed to be reliable and prosperous economic providers. They have often failed to hold together intimate relationships and marriages. They have often failed to fulfill the expectations of society for fathers. They are often reliant on government payments, perhaps disability payments or SSI or Social Security, even if they earned them, rather than earning money from meaningful work.

In the MAGA heartland of West Virginia, 20% of the state's entire GDP consists of federal spending in the state less federal taxes paid from the state, and this is true of basically every county. Even if some of this is subtle, like Medicare and Medicaid provided health coverage, or a Social Security disability pension that was someone's only option to survive, a disabled man of working age who worked in physical labor all of his life, still sees receiving this support as a blow to his sense of self-respect which leaves his self-esteem as something fragile to prop up by means other than being an economic provider. Receiving government aid can feel bad even when you need it and it makes you better off because it is a constant reminder of your own failures.

Cursing the federal government and claiming you can be independent of it, reality be damned, can help compensate for the blow to one's self-esteem and self-respect that flows from being dependent upon it, even though it is counterproductive (at least in the short term) to do so.

Veterans, Hunters, Dangerous Animals, Law Enforcement Response Times, Firearms, And Crime News

Men in red countries are much more likely to be military veterans, than men in blue counties.

Men in red counties are much more likely to have engaged in recreational hunting than men in blue counties.

The higher proportion of men in red counties who are military veterans and/or have engaged in recreational hunting, means that men in red countries are much more likely to be gun owners than men in blue counties, and in particular, are much more likely to own firearms other than handguns.

Due to lower population densities in rural America, where the vast majority of counties are red counties, the average red county resident is a much greater distance from the average law enforcement responder than the average blue county resident, and as a result law enforcement response times to 9-1-1 calls are longer in red counties than in blue counties. Encounters with dangerous wildlife are also much more common in red counties than in blue counties. These circumstances creates a greater perceived need to own firearms for self-defense and the defense of others in red counties than in blue counties.

Also, while blue county news reporting typically covers a whole metropolitan area, resulting in a constant stream of news about violent crime, red county news reporting is typically hyperlocal, covering only a portion of the county around a small town, resulting in fewer reports of violent crimes near the people reading it, even though their crime rates per capita are actually higher. So, red counties tend to be perceived as less crime ridden than they are, while blue counties tend to be perceived as more crime ridden than they actually are. This interferes with the ability of people in red counties to see the connection between their high rates of firearm ownership and lax gun control enforcement and the rates of suicide and homicide and police use of firearms that they experience. In contrast, the connection seems stronger than it is in blue counties, because there is so much crime to cover in a populous metro area that only the most serious violent crimes which often involve firearms, receive news coverage, creating the perception that this is the most typical kind of crime in blue counties even though this isn't the case.

It Wasn't About The Price Of Eggs

If you look at the way that everyone except for white Evangelical Christians voted in the 2024 Presidential election, you get pretty much the election that most college educated voters and Democrats expected in the face of a candidate like Donald Trump - it wouldn't have been even close.

And, white Evangelical Christians make up only 14% of American adults, but are 50% more likely than the average American adult to vote. If they didn't vote so reliably, Trump would also almost surely have lost the election, although the election would still have been reasonably close.

About 18% of all voters were white Evangelical Christians who voted for Trump. They made up more than a third of voters who voted for Trump.

In all, 57% of voters in the 2024 election were white, with just over half of them women; 74% of white men (about 21% of all voters) voted for Trump and 69% of white women (about 20% of all voters) voted for Trump. About 39% of white voters were Evangelical Christians. About 66% of white voters who were not Evangelical Christians voted for Trump (the percentage was higher for non-Evangelical white Christians, especially those who most frequently attend church, and lower for white non-Christians).

UPDATE: I note that this exit poll suggests that 57% of voters were white, 30% of voters were black, 8% of voters were Latino, and 5% were from all other races. The percentage of voters who were black seems very high and this deserves another look. The percentage of the population that is black is about 14%, and there is not a history of gross-overrepresentation of black voters in voter turnout.

Recall that in 2016, Trump eked out an electoral vote win despite not winning the popular vote. In 2020, Trump lost both the electoral vote and the popular vote, but the electoral vote was decided by very thin margins in the decisive swing states. In 2024, of course, Trump won both the electoral vote and the popular vote, but once all the votes are counted (early estimates of the popular vote disproportionately omit a huge share of votes in Democratic strongholds like California and Oregon that could their votes slowly) his popular vote margin will be quite thin.

People are often incapable of accurately articulating the reasons that they do things like vote for a particular candidate, so the large number of Trump voters who ascribed their vote to inflation, even if those candidates were sincerely trying to answer truthfully, shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Almost everyone in the United States experienced inflation with respect to goods like groceries and gasoline at roughly the same rate. On average, hourly wages, a decent metric of ability to pay inflation increased prices among those most squeezed by them, rose faster than inflation over the last four years.

The places where voters support Trump most strongly also coincide rather neatly with the places where the cost of living is lowest, mostly because the cost of housing in rural America, small town America, and smaller rust belt cities is much lower and much more affordable relative to median incomes than in large urban centers. If anything, areas where support for Trump was the strongest experienced less inflation than areas where support for Trump was weakest.

A similar analysis applies to the immigration issue which many Trump supporters identified as important. Immigrants make up a much larger share of the population in "blue" America than they do in "red" America. States like West Virginia and Kentucky, where support for Trump was particularly strong, have proportionately very few immigrants, and the immigrants that they have are more likely to be foreign medical doctors, than competitors for the jobs of middle class men with only high school educations that are among the strongest supporters of Trump.

Immigration driven crime also isn't a reality at all, and certainly isn't a reality in "red" America. Indeed, crime was at its lowest rate since 1967. Rising immigrant driven crime was not part of the lived experience of Trump supporters and concern about this was driven almost entirely by Trump himself and kindred Republican politicians.

One can focus on how 2024 was a little different from 2020, and how that was a little different from 2016. But that misses the big picture and fails to explain what Democrats and college educated people more generally have been baffled by, which is the mystery of how such a deeply flawed candidate could win a national Presidential election, or at least come close.

You can't understand that without understanding how white Evangelical Christians who make up just 14% of the adult population in the United States turned a nineteen percentage point popular vote lead among all other Americans into a popular vote deficit of one or two percentage points once all of the votes are counted, and an clear electoral vote loss, despite, and indeed, to a significant extent, because of Trump's flaws.

The percentage of people in a county who identify as white Christians is an excellent predictor of which Presidential candidate it supported as shown in the chart below.

Counties that were at least 60% white Christian in 2020 were overwhelmingly more likely to support Trump against Biden in that election. Counties that were less than 45% white Christian in 2020 were overwhelmingly more likely to support Biden. The more white Christians a county had, the more likely it was to support Trump. Tuned to distinguish white Evangelical Christians from other Christians, this trend would have been even sharper.

The white Evangelical Christian community in the United States has at its core, roots in the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, mostly in the states that would later join the Confederate States of American and fight and lose the U.S. Civil War.

For the most part, "red" America has fewer immigrants, less religious diversity, and less linguistic diversity than anyplace else in the United States. The members of this community have had a visceral distaste for federal government power since before the Civil War until the present, interrupted only by FDR's New Deal during the Great Depression and by World War II. The members of this community have been anti-science and anti-education since at least the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Their churches were racist as a matter of policy and religious doctrine until the tail end of the Civil Rights movement, a movement that this community vigorously resisted from Reconstruction right up through the anti-DEI and anti-woke movement in the latest election cycle. Questions that probe racist continue to be the best predictors of support for Trump. While that has ceased to be a viable official public doctrine, homophobia and transgender scapegoating have filled some of that void.

Southern whites (who have been predominantly Evangelical Christian since the Second Great Awakening, before which they were the most secular people in the U.S.) were vastly less educated, both formally, and as measured by metrics such as literacy race, numbers of books read, and libraries, than the rest of the country since before the Civil War. Their distrust of public schools and efforts to exit them with publicly funded private schools is at least as old as the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Their lack of education and distrust of it also enhances their trust for Trump who at his best communicates with them with a simple vocabulary and simple sentences that they can understand but avoids coming across as condescending because it comes across as if he a buffoon, rather than his audience. 

Trump's increasing word salad and dementia is hard for even these supporters to understand, but their commitments to Trump at this point are deep enough that it hardly matters.

Their beliefs about women's proper role in society fueled in substantial part by New Testament religious doctrine that reflect sensibilities about gender relations from the first couple of centuries CE in the Roman Empire, were an important reason that they resisted allowing women to vote until the rest of the country eventually dragged them kicking and screaming into doing so - anti-feminism is as much a part of their cultural DNA as racism and distrust of the federal government. 

Their fervent desire to avoid benefiting black people or treating them as equals has jaded their opinions about social welfare and poverty reduction programs since the earliest days after slavery was ended when programs like that were created. In absolute terms, this opposition is counterproductive, but in relative terms, it prevents their collective share of society's wealth from being nudged down.

In relative terms, as a share of income for example, the Civil Rights movement less white men as a group (and white men without college educations even more so) worse off, regardless changes in their absolute earnings. Before then, women were very marginal in the paid workforce, now they make up a little less than half of it at almost all income levels and earn more than half of college degrees (up from barely more than zero in many professionals like law and medicine and science and engineering). Before then, non-whites predominantly got the dregs of the worst jobs, and while the U.S. still isn't at a point of parity, in relative terms, employment prospects for non-whites have improved. Among white men, those with college educations have reaped a huge share of the economic growth in the last half century, while those with only high school educations have seen their inflation adjusted wages increase only slightly. This is partially on them (particularly in the case of men who willfully decline to seek further education or to take their educations seriously), as explained below, but the previous status quo was so profoundly titled in their favor that it was also more or less inevitable. All of these has contributed to a long simmering sense of resentment which demagogues have done their best to exploit, and which Trump has been particularly successful at exploiting.

The result of all of this history has been the development of an insular counterculture that distrusts the government, distrusts educators, distrusts science, and distrusts the mainstream media. This has helped preserve their culture which Evangelical Christian churches helped to foster and nurture. It has also created what political satirists have called a "strain of fact-resistant humans." Unmoored from most of the reliable sources of factually correct information, often proudly, the Evangelical Christian community is especially vulnerable to accepting even blatantly false political rhetoric as true, or at least, as plausible.

The Reconstruction era, and then, a century later after Andrew Jackson dismantled it, the Civil Rights movement, and all along the way, the feminist movement, made acting on some of their core cultural values illegal. Trump has validated their resentment at being forced by the government to disrespect their racist, anti-feminist, anti-science, and anti-academic cultural values. 

He has validated their culture's violence embracing, culture of honor values that they are vigorously punished for honoring from elementary school through adulthood (especially under progressive policies undermining corporal punishment, domestic violence, and physically fighting within groups of men and boys to settle disputes) in the face of support for Canadian style "peace, order, and good government" that a disproportionate share of the other 84% of Americans  embrace. Support for gun ownership rights to facilitate the use of and threat of lethal force as a form of self-help in lieu of reliance upon law enforcement to deal with crime, exemplifies these values symbolically. These values are unsupported by the New Testament which was a total for ending cultures of honor in classical Rome, but are quite at home with the Old Testament conquering Hebrew herders who shared similar values, which they have embraced despite the fact that the Roman Catholic church and the early Reformation churches took to heart the doctrine the Jesus established a "New Covenant" that relieved them from Old Testament Jewish religious laws like the prohibition on eating pork and bacon.

This community is also more comfortable with authoritarianism, common to less economically successful and more economically insecure populations around the world and back to ancient times, than the more economically successful and more economically secure "blue" America.

This community's lack of economic success and this economic insecurity doesn't come from nowhere. Its resistance to science and academic knowledge, its distrust of government, its unwillingness to support a social safety net because it might disproportionately help black people, its tolerance of violence, its misogyny, and its racism are all important factors that contribute to its lack of economic success and economic insecurity. The resistance that white Evangelical Christian men show to higher education and the value of education more generally, is an important reason that so many of them have been left behind in the last half century of economic growth. So has their attitudes towards race, the treatment of women, and physical violence that has made it difficult to fit into national corporate cultures of big businesses where most economic growth takes place, and has made it more challenging for them to find romantic partners and sustain those relationships.

These failures build resentment to the point where many members of this tightly bound subculture with deep (for the U.S.) historical and cultural roots, aren't worried about the possibility of gross mismanagement of a federal government that they have a century and a half or more of cultural wiring to view as a threat that is thwarting them and their culture instead of as a venue through which positive change can be secured. Ending democracy at the federal level is only salient to you as a factor in your Presidential election choice if you believe that an effective federal government is a good thing. If, deep down, you'd really prefer that the federal government collapsed, then voting for a grossly incompetent President who nonetheless shares many of your core values that have been suppressed with the weight of government power for a very long time, isn't very troubling to you. If you resent the laws that regulate you, you don't hold being a felon against someone running for President as strongly as you do if you believe that most federal laws are legitimate.

Commentators that characterize the 2024 election as a broad based rejection of elites and of our governmental and economic system are missing a key point. Trump's political clout rests first and foremost on the strength of an intensely supportive, united subculture that makes up just one in seven American adults, together with a decidedly lopsided minority that reflexively votes for Republicans for a lifetime of different reasons, rather than from modest support from a broad base of Americans.

This intense minority of white Evangelical Christians that is at the core of the MAGA base, as well as a substantial number of kindred white conservative Christians who are not Evangelical Christians, have an intense hate for Democrats, and especially, younger, non-white, and female Democrats, all of which Kamala Harris exemplified to an even greater extent than Hillary Clinton, let alone Joe Biden, a man who started his political career in Delaware as a devoutly Christian segregationist Democrat and pivoted later in his career to being a leader within the Democratic party of the "war on drugs." Biden isn't that man any more, but had roots that come with his age that are much more congenital to members of this subculture. He was harder for them to hate.

Kamala Harris, in contrast, exemplifies the movement for culture change, and ethnic change in America that members of this subculture and community have been resisting for a couple of centuries, and losing, over and over and over again. In their mind, a world with the sexual revolution, racial equality, and gender equality are a lesser circle of hell on Earth and a blatant, more or less genocidal attempt to wide out their culture and identity. And, after so many losses and such a long time in the wilderness, they are hungry and eager to unite to finally get a victory, whatever it takes, even if the instrument of their redemption is not himself virtuous or competent in running the government. Trump's gut instincts and their gut instincts and beliefs about what a leader looks like have been congruent enough for them to go all-in to support him.

In this narrative, the appeal of Trump's antics and ugly side to a minority that is so intensely supportive that their electoral impact is greatly amplified, and Trump's ability to survive events like the sexual assault judgment against him and his criminal conviction that would be a death-knell for a politician appealing to any other subculture in America, makes much more sense.

You can't simply look at the liberal social gospel and communist leanings of the Jesus of the New Testament's gospels that Evangelical Christianity purports to be all about if you want to understand the lived values and culture that Evangelical Christianity protects and sustains. Indeed, sacred religious texts are almost never, in any major world religion a very predictive tool for determining how members of the religion that holds these texts to be sacred lives their lives and fits these texts into their overall culture. The culture comes first, and the elements of the religion that the members of that culture practice are basically window dressing and local color to adorn it.

Ultimately, Christianity, including white Evangelical Christianity, is in decline in the United States, much later than Europe, for example, but in decline nonetheless. Members of this subculture are well aware of these powerful secular trend and willing to take desperate measures to hold onto the power that they historically held, knowing that the trend will soon become completely unstoppable. In politics, policy preferences almost always prevail over process concerns. 

The culture that white Evangelical Christianity sustains and nurtures may have made sense and been functional for the white people of America's slave states in the early 1800s, but it is intensely dysfunctional now. Its culture is a roadmap for failure in the face of the realities of the large American society, which is a big part of why blue leaning counties in the U.S. have twice the per capita GDP of red leaning counties in the U.S. 

Their rise to control of the U.S. government in 2024, through their political unity, high level of political participation, and political ruthlessness in the face of political process norms (a tactic that Trump exemplifies) is, as a result, a major threat to the well-being of the United States. 

America's other cultures, meanwhile, have grown complacent as the nation has bent to their will, are internally divided by their big and diverse tent, and are insufficiently ruthless to unify in response to this threat, and that's why they lost against a numerically much smaller core opposition. Now, they are paying the price for that complacency and division.

Republican Mass Delusion Continues

Voters are most focused on the economy, with 52% of registered voters, driven by Republicans and Republican leaners, citing the economy as “extremely important” to their vote. The second-most-cited “extremely important” issue, democracy in the US, was driven by Democrats.

Here are the top five most-cited “extremely important” issues for Republicans and Republican leaners in the survey:

* Economy

* Immigration

* Terrorism and national security

* Crime

* Taxes

The top five for Democrats and Democratic leaners was completely different:

* Democracy in the US

* Types of Supreme Court justices candidates would pick

* Abortion

* Health care

* Education

From CNN.

The Republican list is depressing and shows the power of disinformation. 

The economy is about as strong as it has been in decades. Inflation has been lower than wage growth during the Biden Administration and it ended after one post-COVID spike. We have had sustained low unemployment. The stock market is near record highs. Economic growth is strong. Productivity growth is strong.

Crime is the lowest it has been since 1969. 

Federal taxes are historically low. 

Terrorist threats against the U.S. are almost exclusively far right terrorism supported by Republicans. National security is sound with the U.S. itself not at war or in harms way, even though its allies Ukraine and Israel are at war. 

Immigration isn't causing economic harm, isn't causing crime, and is mostly absent, almost entirely, from red states.

Basically, all of the top issues of Republicans are not legitimately problems, and even if they were, none of Trump's policies or proposals would do anything to address them.

It is another day in the Bizzaro world that is Red State America.

Why Is This Race Close?

The cause may be economic disparities between the educated and the uneducated. The Democrats are trying much harder than the Republicans to address this. But many less educated white voters are just so frustrated that they want to burn everything down and the Trump is offering to do that. Trump is also basically seen as offering to smite their perceived enemies, like immigrants and non-whites and feminists and gays, even though they aren't actually to cause of these voters' woes.

So how is it possible that this is not a done deal? I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer, but I can throw out a few theories.

One obvious potential factor is that Harris would be the first woman to serve as president and commander in chief. It amazes me that the preceding sentence can be written in 2024 — decades after the careers of Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and so many other women who have led their nations in peace and war. But, again, here we are. . . .

White voters without a college degree are a key component of Trump’s base, and two recent polls — one by the New York Times and one by CNN — showed Harris with a huge deficit of roughly 35 points to Trump among this segment. That is worse than Biden did against Trump in 2020, when he lost this big demographic by 32 points, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Whites without a college degree make up 42 percent of the electorate[.]

From Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post.

The Unattainable Possible

Lots of the things I'd like to see in the United States already exist elsewhere.

If you want to look at societies with almost no civilian gun ownership, you need look no farther than Japan and the United Kingdom. No other country is as gun ridden as the U.S.

Just about everyplace in the developed and developing world has more affordable, universal healthcare that also happens to produce better results. Most developed countries also make higher education more affordable than the U.S.

There are dozens of countries with society in general, and the election administration and the courts in particular, are less corrupt and partisan.

Lots of countries are better at not punishing innocent people in their criminal justice systems. Few countries are so extremely punitive in their criminal punishments.

Only a handful of societies have as many Evangelical Christians or comparable religious fundamentalists as the U.S. does, and a great many societies have more secular populations than the United States.

Few Western countries are so plagued by having massive shares of their electorates that are deeply disconnected from reality.

Many countries translate the popular will into legislative power more accurately in their political systems than the U.S. does.

Many countries have lower drinking ages and don't have almost fully criminalized prostitution. A number of countries have less punitive approaches to drugs.

Most developed countries treat workers better, and have a better work-life balance.

Japan does a better job of providing affordable housing in major cities. Lots of countries are better at land use regulation. China does a better job of building major construction projects quickly and efficiently.

France and many other countries use more nuclear power and use less coal than the United States. Several countries have a bigger market share of EV vehicles. Many countries have better high speed rail systems.

Most developed countries do a better job of taxing the rich, maintaining a social safety net, and discouraging extreme income inequality. Few developed countries have the serious homelessness problem that the U.S. does.

All but a couple countries use the metric system, while the U.S. is one of the countries with a mostly non-metric hybrid system.

Many countries do a better job of preventing consumer/investor/ordinary person oriented fraud and deceptive trade practices. Most countries have posted prices that are the real price of a good and services being purchased, which are not adjusted up to reflect sales taxes and tips. 

The U.S. is hardly the worst place in the world. It is affluent and economically productive. It has a grossly disproportionate share of the best colleges and universities in the world. It has the most advanced air force, the largest navy, and some of the most well-trained ground troops. It's financial markets generally work pretty well. It has a large foreign born population on a percentage basis that is quite well integrated into society (which isn't to say that it doesn't have political tensions over immigration). There are developed countries where the far-right movements are worse and more powerful although the U.S. is right up there among them. The products of its entertainment industry are world class. The U.S. is among the most protective in the world of free speech and religious freedom (even to a fault). The U.S. is one of the best places in the world to be a Jew and is home to about 40%-45% of the world's Jews.

But knowing that goals for the U.S. are attained elsewhere, but are unattainable in the U.S. despite being possible, is very frustrating.

Messaging And The Last Seven Weeks

Yesterday, seven weeks before the 2024 Presidential election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had a Presidential debate, that, by all accounts, Harris performed well in (in stark contrast to the debate between Trump and President Biden that triggered Biden's withdrawal from the Presidential race).

Harris used this rare moment with the eyes of the nation on her and Trump to go on the attack and to show, as much as tell, the audience that Trump is a weak and small man who has lost his marbles, by baiting him into rants that prove this point.

The Race Is Close

Terrifyingly, this Presidential race is extremely close. Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona are all polling within one percentage point of a tied race. Harris has a 1.7 percentage point lead in Michigan and a 2 percentage point lead in Wisconsin. Trump leads by 4.4 percentage points in Florida. One candidate or the other leads by at least 5.3 percentage points in every other state or electoral vote granting Congressional District.

Harris leads in national polling by 2.8 percentage points, which given the inherent bias of the Electoral College against Democrats relative to the popular vote, is just barely enough, or maybe not quite enough, to win.

Worse yet, polling was consistently and decisively biased against Trump in both 2016 and in 2020, mostly because of low response rates from Trump supporters relative to supporters of the Democratic candidates. So, notwithstanding the narrow lead in the polls that Harris has, and the efforts of pollsters to address this problem, Harris may be doing worse than the polls are letting on.

This makes no sense.

If you look at the race from a rational, logical perspective, as Democrats are prone to do, this makes no sense.

The fundamentals of the U.S. economy and the state of the union are strong.

- Unemployment has been low on a sustained basis for a record length of time.

- Wages have been rising.

- Gas prices are below average and the current rate of inflation is low.

- The stock market and the gross national product have been growing tremendously.

- Crime rates are at close to record lows.

- The teen birthrate has never been lower.

- Opioid overdose rates have finally stabilized after growing relentlessly for decades.

- We are a nation as close to at peace has we have been for decades. The war in Afghanistan is over. The Iraq War is over.

Trump should be a uniquely weak candidate.

- Trump lost the 2020 election and a lot of Americans are sick of him.

- Trump's speeches are routinely rambling, almost incoherent word salad that are riddled with multiple factual assertions that are not true every single minute, alternating with just bizarre, inexplicable claims.

- Trump is a former Democrat, who lived most of his life in New York City, is married to an immigrant, and claims to be a billionaire who started out in life with a $400 million inheritance back when that was worth a lot more than it is today. He has very little in common with his based in any way.

- The departure from Afghanistan was chaotic and ugly because Trump cut a deal with the Taliban shortly before he lost the 2020 election, that undermined the U.S. backed regime there, Afghans who backs U.S. forces, and U.S. forces.

- Roe v. Wade was overturned, in an immensely unpopular decision, because he appointed three ultra-conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court. Public confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has never been lower.

- Trump has taken the side of long standing U.S. enemies like Vladimir Putin and King Jung-Un, and has shown open admiration of China's authoritarian leader.

- Trump stands convicted of 34 felonies for which he will face sentencing after the election and before the inauguration.

- Trump is still dealing with three more criminal cases where he was indicted, all of which are tangled up in appeals unrelated to the merits of whether he committed the crimes.

- While the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that Trump was not allowed to run for office because he engaged in an insurrection was not upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, this decision was reversed without disturbing the determination of the Colorado courts that Trump had engaged in an insurrection.

- Several dozen of Trump's senior close associates have been convicted of felonies.

- No living former Republican President endorsed Trump, and only a handful of senior officials from his administration have done so, while many former official in his administration have endorsed Harris.

- Trump's personal lawyer has been disbarred and is bankrupt from sanctions imposed upon him for his misconduct fighting the 2020 election results. Many other lawyers who helped him in connection with that were also disbarred or had their licenses to practice law suspended. Some of the people who pushed that losing fight are in prison.

- About a thousand people involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital to overturn his losing electoral vote outcome have been convicted of crimes, many of which were serious.

- Fox News had to settle a defamation case related to its election outcome fraud for about $800 million. Several other conservative news commentators who backed him have lost defamation suits that sent them to bankruptcy and/or lost their jobs.

- Trump's Truth Social conservative social media outlet has seen its stock market price tank.

- Trump lost a civil fraud lawsuit resulting in a judgment against him for hundreds of millions of dollars.

- Trump lost a pair of defamation and civil sexual assault lawsuits, resulting in a civil finding that he sexually assaulted a woman.

- Trump is 78 years old and starting to show strong signs of dementia in his public speeches.

- The media not longer hesitates to call out Trump for his non-stop lying about every factual matter under the sun.

- Trump's mismanagement of the COVID epidemic cost hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately Republicans, their lives.

- Trump ran up the deficit tremendously, and not just from COVID related spending. A lot of that deficit comes from huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich that did little or nothing to help the economy.

- The fact that Trump had an affair with a prostitute while his wife was pregnant with his youngest child, and then paid her $100,000 of hush money.

- Trump has had five children with three wives and indisputably cheated on all three of his wives, including his current one.

- Both Trump and his wife are former pornography actors.

- Trump rarely, if ever, attends church and lacks even surface level understanding of the Bible or Christian doctrine.

- Trump's older children have profited handsomely from selling their relationship to him for the corrupt reason of their apparent political influence and Trump himself received immense improper personal financial gain during his Presidency. Their misconduct with a charity that they were involved in has caused them to be barred from running charities in New York State.

- Trump's businesses, have gone bankrupt six times, including a casino.

- Trump University was a dismal failure that he had to settle for a huge sum because he personally participated in fraud promoting it.

- Trump has a long history of losing or having to settle racial discrimination lawsuits and his father was a literal Nazi and KKK member.

J.D. Vance isn't helping his ticket.

- Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, has also repeatedly put his foot in his mouth, and plays to the MAGA base, not to swing voters.

Biden's departure should help.

- Joe Biden's advanced age had been a major talking point in the Presidential race. Now that talking point has been turned on its head with Harris replacing him in the race.

- Joe Biden did little campaigning, wasn't very effective at it when he did, and did miserably in the first debate.

Walz helps his ticket.

- Governor Walz from Minnesota is a very decent guy and a military veteran (like Vance) who is moral in all of the ways that Trump and Vance are not.

Republicans in Congress are dysfunctional.

- The Republican Party holds a razor thin majority in the U.S. House but has been plagued with infighting, struggled to elected a speaker in the first place, replaced their speaker, and struggles to pass even basic appropriations bills without Democratic party backing.

- Maverick gadflies in the House GOP have more power than they should because the GOP majority is so thin, and they have repeatedly embarrassed their party on a national stage, while undermining their own majority coalition.

- There is a real possibility that the government will shut down on October 1, 2024, a little more than a month before the election, because House Republicans can't agree on a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning.

- In the U.S. Senate, a rogue Senator from Alabama has single handedly impaired the functioning and good order of the U.S. military by blocking defense department related appointments.

- The Republicans have not been very effective in achieving their goals in the U.S. Senate despite the fact that two Democratic Senators have left their party midterm (and will not be re-elected in 2024).

- For example, Biden has appointed new federal judges at roughly the same rate that Trump did.

Why is Trump so greatly over performing in face of all of the factors that should make this race a landslide for Harris?

* At the federal level at least, partisan divides have never been bigger. There is not a single Democrat who is more conservative than a single Republican in Congress. There are very few moderates of either party in Congress. The magnitude of the gap between the parties is as big as it has ever been since the eve of the U.S. Civil War.

* The amount of split ticket voting in 2020 was a record low and all but about 8% of voters have a clear partisan preference which they always back in every election.

* The deep partisan divide reflects a deep economic and cultural divide between "red counties" and "blue counties". Biden won less than 54% of the popular vote in 2020, but the counties he won account for 71% of the nation's GDP. Trump won a little more than 46% of the popular vote, but the counties he won account for only 29% of the nation's GDP.

* Red America is less educated, less affluent, more religious, less diverse, and more rural, than Blue America. Red America has participated very little in the last 50 years of economic growth.

* The economic weakness of less educated white men in Red America has caused them to fail as economic providers resulting in them less often getting married, usually having children out of wedlock, and getting divorced when they do get married early and often at unprecedented rates. Their failure as providers has also driven deaths of despair, and caused many of them to have their parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect, or to have their parental rights marginalized in custody fights, and driven lots of domestic violence criminalizing them.

* Red America has interpreted its failing families as caused by moral failure, gay rights, abortion, and feminism resulting in backlash against "wokeness", when the real problem is that the economy no longer needs many uneducated, unskilled, socially rough around the edges men, leaving them with regular bouts of unemployment and low wages.

* White religious people, living in an increasingly secular society in which they are not thriving economically, and are constantly losing out to educated knowledge workers (an increasing share of whom are non-white women), have ceased to trust the mainstream media, educational institutions at all levels, and the government. Together with the rise of social media and niche Internet media sources, this has left them exposed to ridiculous lies about almost everything going on in the world, which they embraced, initially, to protect their religious worldviews that are at odds with science and reality.

Trump's Messaging

- Trump's campaign has tried, with considerable success, to blame Biden for the short but intense period of high inflation post-COVID, even though it was driven by factors beyond Biden's control (like Ukraine War driven oil price surges and big corporate profit taking greed). This, and Biden's failure to regularly tout his economic successes, means that many conservatives don't realize how strong the economy is doing.

- Trump did his best in the debate, and has in all of his campaigns, tried to demonize immigration and hasn't hesitated to resort to bald faced lies to back that effort. In part this is playing to economic fear, that Red America sees waves of low skilled workers as competing with them in a zero sum game for unskilled work. But more than that, he is focusing on immigrant driven crime (which is contrary to reality because crime is low and because even undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than native born Americans) and on immigrants undermining a white Evangelical Christian nationalist vision for America and its culture. He's also tried to fan completely unsubstantiated claims that fraudulent voting by immigrants who aren't allowed to vote is depriving his backers, the "true Americans" of their rightful control of their country. Never mind that immigrants are particularly scarce in many of the places where Trump's message is most warmly received, like West Virginia.

- The MAGA movement isn't about governing. Trump himself is mostly only weakly interested in policy despite the nefarious and terrifying Project 2025 agenda that has been prepared for him by right wing think tanks. Conservative wonks in think tanks want to govern in a way that transforms the nation with hard core conservative policies to fit their minority vision for the country. But, the MAGA movement and Trump himself, are about persecuting their enemies for disloyalty and out of spite, and about burning down the entire institution of the federal government (and a lot of state and local government) which they believe has failed them and they don't trust.

- A fair amount of the MAGA movement is about older, disgruntled white people in places that have failed economically who mostly aren't thriving themselves, trying to hold onto white male Christian hegemony in an economy where you can be prosperous without education or skills, as the nation steadily becomes less Christian, less white, more educated, and has given more power and rights to women. They want to roll back cultural change including gay rights and feminism. They want to deny the existence of things like climate change.

- They want everyone to buy American and forego international trade. Trump is pushing big new tariffs in his tax proposals. His vision for America is isolationist and anti-globalist. 

-They are attracted by the certainty and manliness of authoritarian leaders internationally. Trump touted support from far right Hungarian leader Mr. Orban in the debate.

- Trump's message is a message of fear and division. Harris is trying to go back to Obama's message of hope and unity.

- The Democratic party's left wing has to some extent fallen for the trap that Trump has created for them, threatening to back third-party candidates due to disillusionment with Biden over issues like Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians that isn't salient to many voters, and focusing on the negative long term perspective on the economy rather than the good news from Biden's administration compared to Trump's administration.