When they turned, they turned Republican, not MAGA. I think the OP’s question was how can they still vote R meaning conservative when the Republican party is no longer conservative but MAGA? I think it is a legitimate question. I for one don’t understand it.
The Dixiecrats were pretty racist collectively. So they probably did ally closely to the MAGA.
Most of the union rank and file I know are Trump supporters. It’s absolutely bizzare talking to them.
It seems like they’d happily lose their pensions if they could bash [slurs for] gays/Asians/Blacks/Hispanics again. And this includes those who ARE Asian or Hispanic.
Of course Vegans can eat spare ribs. Vegans, by definition, being people from the Vega star system.
The underlying issue is that word definitions are only useful in relation to a speech community. It’s always helpful to describe your own usage; it’s not helpful to prescribe another’s.
:raises hand: 
If you want sophistry I can retort that there are no spare ribs in the Vega star system. I know that for a fact because pigs don’t fly into interstellar space. In fact, pigs not so much fly as they plummet. Not dissimilar to sheep.
For better or worse, human language is not confined to the purely factual.
But if anything goes the No True Scotsman fallacy (my starting point) has no meaning either. Still the OP’s question remains: how can there be so many people that will vote for Trump in november claiming to be conservatives when they are clearly not. Some answers suggest that their ranks are swelled by former democrat voters that have turned MAGA (Dixiecrats and unionist have been mentioned), while some republican voters have switched to Harris. And still the election is too close to call? Bizarr, if you ask me.
I came across an old article the other day about the 2012 election. It suggested that one of the reasons that Romney’s campaign did such a poor job with its internal polling and predictions was that they assumed that the independents would vote for Romney, because independents tended to favour the challenger over the incumbent.
What they missed was that a lot of independents were former Republicans, who couldn’t call themselves Democrats, but broke for Obama, contrary to past models of how independents voted.
You miss my point. If the Right has slipped out to NAZIville, had the left be dragged along a bit? Overton window shift.
Several people have commented that American left is no where near the left in other countries.
Language is not anything goes. It’s cooperation among speakers. If would-be communicators don’t understand each other, then any discussion has no meaning.
There’s little point to arguing about what words mean. No one has authority to coerce their word usage on others. With respect to “are MAGA supporters conservative”, the answer depends on what one means by “conservative”. So people need to describe what they mean, so others understand. And that gives a basis for an interesting discussion.
I think there are a couple of factors at work.
The first is identity creep. The descriptor becomes a label independent of the word. The people in the group slowly shift identity from the core values of the original group, to encompass some related concepts. Then it shifts a again. Etc. If they retain any attept at matching the label to the meaning, it is through distortion, soon, and self-deception.
“Conservative values” does a lot, as does the catering to the “moral majority”. Social conservatives carry the load of having some meaning for the term. Fiscal conservatives just lie to themselves about what they stand for.
Second factor is grievance politics. By the Tea Party, a lot of the right were functioning under a persecution complex. The liberals were “getting everything and destroying America’s values”. First Jim Crow falls, affirmative action is enacted, then women’s equality and Roe v. Wade, prayer kicked out of public schools. Next comes gay rights, rejection of intelligent design. Blue laws fall.
Basically protectionism of white and Christian privilege gets taken away.
This creates an atmosphere of persecution - “we’re losing everything” - to an audience that is primed to the idea they are often persecuted against. My own church was teaching about that and the Romans and how persecution continues around the world - ignoring the success of christianity under religious freedom in western societies.
The tea party engaged this with a rejection of negotiation, rants against “political correctness”. Social culture began to split.
More social change favors liberal outcomes - gay marriage, me too, beginning of trans acceptance.
Trump came along and told all those aggrieved that they were wronged, and that he would fight for them. He told the racists that they could be proud and vocal. He told whites that they were being discriminated against and that he would stand up for them. He told christians that they were entitled to privilege and he would restore it.
And they all loved him for it, and voted for him. And a young cadre of politicians saw him succeed, and copied him. And the Republican leadership started excited that he was stirring their base into success, but then found he was sucking all the air to himself, and to keep power themselves they had to go along.
And so the party catered to the MAGA and the less extremist conservatives clung to their party identity and made excuses.
So now they either have quietly left the party or delude themselves that the ends justify the means or just buy the lies that anyone in the left is desperate to destroy America.
That’s true, but it was true long before the modern conservative movement. And don’t forget that the Democratic party used to include hidebound reactionaries before they were driven out by the party’s support of civil rights.
I completely understand how some conservatives would find comfort in believing that MAGA is some alien mind control parasite that infected the half of the country who were conservatives and turned them into monsters, which is utterly not their fault!
Nonsense. I was rereading (for an article I’m writing) Al Franken’s 1999 Why Not Me?, a political parody of his fanciful 2000 presidential campaign and subsequent short presidency. Franken presents himself as a narcissistic ignorant angry buffoon who blunders from event to event in 1999 before the primaries only to have his campaign’s single issue - a hatred of ATM machines - give him the nomination when they go haywire during Y2K. He’s a Democrat - saying terrible things about Al Gore - but his Republican opponents are even worse. Pat Buchanan releases a platform that is nothing but “America First/Anti-Abortion.”
This history is only 25 years old. Most of us should remember it well. The monster that was conservatism was already being well-fed by people like Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich. I will go much farther: I’m over 70 and there has never been a single moment in my lifetime in which the Republicans were not the party of evil. (See the related thread.)
I have no patience for conservatives in any form. I barely have more patience for people who don’t know their history yet prattle on about it. Trump is not a newborn aberration. The conservatives spent decades setting up the pins for him and he knocked them down in a beautiful strike. Trump is your fault. You (plural) are to blame. The party is rotten down to the last precinct. I have equal fury for people in the Democratic Party - which has never been left of European leftists, never, ever - who seem to want to coast along and not fight the evil that has been obvious and ubiquitous.
I could rant on for days but this isn’t the place. Short version: What people who don’t like the equivalence of “Republicans” and “conservatives” should spend all their time working on is the very much earned equivalence of “Republicans,” “conservatives,” and “evil.”
They always were “MAGA”, just without the name. They are the same faction that when they were part of the Democrats made the Democrats the party of racist, sexism and reaction. And the same one that started the Civil War in the name of slavery, and before that insisted that slavery be permitted in the US upon its founding.
It’s all the same stream of bigotry and cruelty, flowing down the generations and dating back to the founding of the nation - and America’s Original Sin of permitting slavery that permanently tainted it.
Not sure where to put this, but possibly relevant here:
It’s the most tumultuous chapter yet in the endlessly controversial tenure of Williams, who took the helm of the state GOP in 2023, and has angered many in the party for his hard right stances and willingness to attack other Republicans. [ . . .]
Before the removal vote, a series of speakers lambasted Williams for what they said was a lack of leadership and an unwillingness to work with others. Several criticized him for his homophobic and transphobic messages).
At least some of them seem to still be Trumpists, though.
So it is less that he is Far Right, and more that he doesn’t hide it well enough?
Good for you! I was raised as an old school Small Government/Socially AND Fiscally Responsible Conservative.
I’m not sure there are any of those left (who are willing to stick their necks out).
We’re Democrats now. 
That’s very interesting, some of the Republicans voting for his ouster because of his anti-trans and homophobic stance.
These are Colorado Republicans, trying to win in a very liberal state. But maybe it is a foreshadowing for a pendulum return?