The US internet buddies I've talked to who voted republican did it more because they did not under any circumstance want to vote for the democratic party.
Based on how intensely they despised the thought of voting dem, I got the feeling the republican candidate could literally have been Satan and they'd still vote rep.
It's easy to understand, though? Daily outrage and vilification porn. Highly addictive stuff, and people will equivocate and believe the most preposterous things you've ever heard in order to keep the outrage righteous and their pornographer of choice credible.
They have no choice to believe that he is the one that promotes freedom, and his adversaries the opposite. Not believing that would mean their outrage is not righteous, which would make future supply worthless, and their brains will just not allow that.
Yes I'm really surprised and scared to see how much people actually like being consumed by anger and hate. We see the same in the Netherlands now since the radical right party came to power.
I've tried to 'disarm' this in some of my ex-friends with actual facts to show that they've been duped into many of their sources of anger. But it's like they don't want to know. Like you say, they want to hold on to it.
I don't see them anymore because I can't deal with that negativity.
The “Trump is the lesser evil” camp has got to be tiny. Trump overwhelmingly won the primary and something like 84% percent of republicans give Trump a favorable approval rating in polls this month.
Republicans are really good at misinformation, they've convinced their entire base that all democrats are AOC and Bernie Sanders types and billionaire elites and there's a massive conspiracy to LGBT everything and open borders and remove Israel's right to self defense.
Democrats are really bad at appealing to their base. During the election, they attempted to flank Trump from the right on several conservative talking points like immigration and the Israel-Palestine conflict, while promising their base mostly "fundamentally nothing will change" vibes.
We're hoping this leads to the collapse of the democrat party into a new party (both parties currently represent billionaire elites), but I suppose the Democrat party can remain irrational longer than you can remain unrepresented.
The Democratic party has been slowly dying since Reagan almost entirely because of Fox News. It was apocryphally invented entirely to prevent another republican president from having to step down due to the unpopularity of their acts. Since then, America voted for the "TV personality" president in such a landslide that it killed all democrat power in the US. The democrats adopted the conservative's economic policy in response, and that got us Clinton, but Americans kept watching Fox News, and voted for a literal nepobaby for their new president, who immediately started at least one outright illegal war, which every republican who voted for him will insist was awful but also they can't vote for democrats because they are evil, and they mostly voted for him again in 2004!
Everyone who said "Democrats want to trans our kids" got their information from right wing information sources, and they did it willingly and purposely, and EXCLUDED OR IGNORED any source that tried to carry the actual left wing message.
What the hell counter-party to this system do you think could possibly rise out of the ashes? Any counter to the republicans has to contend with the same effect of a population that willingly and purposely opt in to a propaganda outlet?
Fox News lost viewership after they said the 2020 election wasn't stolen!
My brother, who agreed the 2020 election wasn't stolen, still spends his time in right wing information spheres and still votes for republicans. "For guns" he says, but no democrat has ever done anything to his guns and our supposedly liberal state enacted constitutional carry. He still wants to shoot all democrats.
Hell, my most right wing uncle who consistently posts hateful anti-women memes on facebook (to the point that the rest of my conservative family members who mostly agree with "women are lesser" in practice still thought he was problematic!) insisted that he wished Trump would get the fuck off twitter. You can bet he reads all of trump's tweets.
There is ample study that shows that people who vote republican will APPROVE of a progressive ideology right up until you tell them a democrat wants it.
So we must conclude that they support this behaviour. Kinda weird considering his audience is super conservative especially on sexual topics.
But I've given up trying to understand it. I'm just glad I don't live in the US.