Why People voted for Trump

About half the people in America voted for Trump.   People deep in the blue bubble have a hard time understanding why.   

Hillary Clinton's campaign gave ample evidence to a vast majority of Americans that Trump was a risky choice and was temperamentally unsuited to be president.  Yet a lot of people voted for him anyway.

Trump was Republican enough

Here is why:   

1.  They were Republicans and by the end of the campaign Trump seemed like a Republican.  Republicans vote for Republicans, duh.

2.  They didn’t like Hillary because they have heard bad things about her for decades, first that she was a crazy liberal feminist and more recently that she was a corrupted, pay-for-play, rich, entitled person who cashed in on politics and then thought she didn’t need to follow everyone else’s rules.  She was crooked.

White people noticed and thought it pandering

3.  They were white and Hillary cast her lot with people of color, saying they were being screwed by whites for hundreds of years.  Hillary formed a team and they weren’t on it  and they resented having it implied they were racist oppressors.   Even white women felt this way.  They voted their race, not their gender.

4.  They were religious and Trump was a defender of religion even if he wasn’t religious personally and he would put some people on the Supreme Court who would push back against all this secular disrespect for religion.

5.  They were rural and for golly sakes the Democrats just love all this sharing stuff—mass transit, cooperative apartments, sewerage systems, municipal water systems, environmental regulations, building permits, zoning rules, public schools, and especially taxes.   Rural and suburban people live with elbow room of a single family detached house, or better yet some acreage,  because they don’t want to share a wall and elevator and a billion rules with other people.  

Many Americans dislike what they know about Muslims

6.  They liked what Trump said in plain language about things they actually felt about Muslims (they are scary) and blacks (getting too many reverse-discrimination advantages) and immigrants (too many, too fast) and crime (there is plenty of it, government statistics be darned).  They liked that he didn’t apologize for saying what they secretly thought.  And Trump said Obama was maybe foreign born and a Muslim and something about that rings true.

7.  They wanted change and the Democrats had their turn and things were a mess in the Middle East and Obamacare was expensive and it launched badly, and even though things are better than they were 8 years ago they could be lots better, so lets try something new.  Trump will shake things up.

8.  They were Hispanic and they know full well that some of their neighbors are scamming the system and they themselves can vote because they came to America legally with great effort, yet now a bunch of line-jumpers are trying to get in without playing by the rules, and it is making it harder for the good people like themselves who did play by the rules.

9.  They were blue collar industrial workers, or who knew some, or identified with them, or in some other way thought Trump's message on jobs sounded about right--and he certainly seemed more passionate on the issue than Hillary, because at lease he proposed to do something, even if it turned out to be wrong.