Ingredients to the popularity of MAGA for younger voters:
1.) Generational Economic Rural decline. Even the people that say they live in ‘the country’ just commute farther when they go to work in the cities. They identify with those roots though.
2.) Our Government has not helped these communities enough, but to voters the GOP pays at least lip service to the plight of the farmer, and this is crucial, they’ve been able to convince the public their platform is one of Rural America. In contrast Clinton’s NAFTA kicked American manufacturing in the testicles.
3.) Modern technology creates more isolation while suggesting more videos that keep you engaged rather than informed, and those use emotional triggers for clicks.
Half of our Nation is not crazy or stupid. A significant portion of our country is hurting and needs understanding and solutions if we want to fix this. I have grown tired of reading that I should hate and fear half of my people. However convincing they think their argument is the result will be the same, we still have to live together.
10 years into the Trump era, I think one thing MAGA/Trump really gets, and the DNC/Democratic Party still doesn’t (and perhaps never will,) is that what you say matters a lot more than what you do. Trump wins half of the nation’s votes because he says the things that appeal to their ears, even if his actions generate the opposite outcome of what they want. However horrid Trump is, he vibes with a lot of people on some sort of direct heart-to-heart frequency - so much so that even a significant chunk of black, Hispanic, Asian and female voters went for him (who would have normally gone D). The only Democrats I can think of who’ve ever come close to Trump in this skill are Obama, Bernie and perhaps AOC.
There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t because the top Democratic politicians are stupid. It’s because the kind of people who care more about what a politician says rather than what they do are now mostly Republican voters. That is what made the Trump revolution.
The Republicans and Democrats, IMHO, traded two segments of the voting public. Republicans inherited those minorities (Black / Hispanic / Asian / it doesn’t matter because it’s about the mindset not about which minority group they are a member of) who think in the same way that the MAGA base does. Democrats inherited the “we care about our principles (as awful as those might be) more than empty slogans” Republicans, AKA the Liz Cheneys of the world. The former group was probably larger than the latter, and so the Republicans were able to solve their “demographic problem” that they were running into / would have run into with someone like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, or John Kasich at the helm.
That demographic problem hasn’t actually been solved, and Republicans know it. That is why they will never go back to selecting those kinds of Republicans to lead the party. On the other hand, Democratic candidates know they will get nowhere by running on empty platitudes to try to turn out the rank and file Liz Cheney type voters on Election Day. Those kinds of voters won’t respond to that kind of appeal.
My theory is that a lot of Trump voters seem to really like Trump’s machismo, and aren’t so enthusiastic about candidates who may have their best interests at heart, are intelligent, and so on, but kind of milquetoast.
They feel like leaders who aren’t brash, outspoken, aggressive, and who GAF aren’t appropriate to vote for. That’s also why women are right out- they’re really big on gender roles as well, and strong women tend to buck those roles and get castigated for that reason alone (see Hillary Clinton)
So when Trump’s saying ridiculous stuff and getting away with it, it’s a positive thing, because it shows how macho and powerful he is- other politicians would suffer some sort of backlash, but not Trump. And they feel like he’s the winning team, and they want to be part of that winning team and stick it to “them”, where “them” is the Democratic party and every out group that Trump and the Republicans go after.
It’s far from rational, but clearly if everyone was voting rationally, we’d have blue landslides, with only sociopaths and fools voting Republican. But there are a lot of otherwise reasonable people voting for him.
I also think single-issue voters are a much bigger thing on that side of the aisle. I can’t count the number of people I’ve met who vote Republican because of either abortion positions or gun positions. Those two issues are critically important to a surprisingly large segment of the population, so much so that they’ll literally overlook just about anything else to vote for the pro-life/pro 2A candidates.