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mbg721 | on: Trump wins presidency for second time
Mostly because "they're stupid" is a lazy argument that ignores why you think they're stupid. You can say "Well, they voted against their best economic interests," assuming they're all net recipients of government cash, but they say they don't want to be, and they want to dismantle executive departments they perceive as wasteful. You can say "They're violent," but Trump campaigned on being the peace-negotiator who didn't start any wars, and Harris had no real response to that. You can say "He hates women," but there are apparently enough women who are either pro-life or didn't see abortion as the main campaign issue. Harris's commercials said "We want change," but she's the incumbent! If change didn't happen by now, why would it four years from now?
tzs | parent
From what I've seen from Trump supporters on NextDoor you are missing a lot of cases where it is hard to come up with a good explanation that doesn't involve some stupidity or at least willful ignorance.

For example I've seen people saying they were going to vote for him because he'll stop undocumented immigrants from eating pets in Springfield OH. No one has been able to find any evidence of that.

There are also the people who say they will vote for him because he promises to get rid of some specific government service or program, and it turns out from their other comments that this is a service or program that they depend on but don't realize it is the same program.

Going the other way, there are people on NextDoor who I've suspected were a bit stupid long before I saw them in any political discussion. E.g., people going on about contrails being the government spraying us with chemicals or the new electric meters rolled out in this area over the last few years will make us sick because of their remote read capabilities (but the ones they replaced were also remote read--apparently they never noticed that they never saw a meter reader in all the years they had it).

Whenever one of those people later posted something that did say how they would vote it almost invariably was for Trump, and it would be for reasons like the ones above.

This suggests that while there might be reasons for a non-stupid person to vote for Trump, he also captured a big fraction of the votes of stupid people. That I think is one of the biggest difference between Trump and other candidates from both parties. Trump might be the first to actively court the stupid vote.