This really sunk in for me when I looked at the exit polls from this year's primary, which I had never done before. It was pretty consistent that, with Bernie supporters as the sole exception, the majority of voters weren't deciding who to vote for or support until a few days before they voted, or even the day of the vote. By my interpretation meaning they are not paying attention long-term, don't know much about the candidates, and are just putting some brief effort into making a shallow judgment just before voting, or even just going and checking a box based on name recognition alone. It took me to a new level of jaded.
I think the uninformed voter is actually a significant bloc. Not that they don't have political opinions and leanings. But they're not based on information. They're based on feeling their way through things. And voting behaviors are based on which candidate appeals to and/or manipulates their feelings about things, based on their prior exposures to vague bits and pieces of notions and ideas and how those intersect with their personal anxieties and identity.
Propaganda is a thing that works, after all, and it's rooted in how the majority engages with politics. Or rather... doesn't.
Edit:
This isn't to do exclusively or even mainly with conservative voters, either. Just look at the countless examples out there of Democrats admitting their support for a candidate in the primary was based on that candidate's gender or things like appearing "professorial".
Simple. There was basically zero difference in terms of their overall policies, so the voters leaned for who they thought would beat Trump.
And then they selected the guy from the administration Trump was a direct, hand grenade response to, particularly in the forms of establishment, agreements like the Transpacific Partnership that ended up sending more jobs out than keeping them and causing a collapse of more rural economies, illegal immigrants in the US being over 10 million for the entirety of Obama's term in spite of multiple amnesty programs he put into place that would have lowered the numbers (ones done by executive order rather than congress, which feeds back into establishment via concerns of overreach), and intervention in the middle east. Mix a bit of American nationalism* (follow the asterisk) and there you get his base.
And if you look over his presidency, when did he take hits to his rating? Year 1, when he was working with the establishment he was voted to be a hand grenade to. When there was a threat to go into Syria and more direct interference in the middle east with our troops. The economic slowdown of Covid-19. First two took until the start of when Covid hit to recover (spike was due to the weekly addresses), and the third was always going to be temporary because it was a virus-derived thing done from little info and currently it is not him holding the country still in lockdown, but the opposition party where they have control, so he's already back to pre-Covid numbers.
And if those numbers are only partly due to Covid and more largely due to the BLM rioting that are kinda only continuing due to the local mayors and governors not taking the assistance he has offered, with DAs releasing the ones that had charges pending, Trump's approval might well rise higher what with inertia being a bit greater. Especially as it spreads to the suburbs where families typipcally live at the same time he's appointing a family-oriented person to be a Supreme Court judge.
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*What most people think of in terms of Nationalism is not nationalism, but Jingoism. I am not doing so here. The definition of Nationalism is:
Nationalism is an idea and movement that promotes the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power (popular sovereignty). It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on shared social characteristics of culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics (or the government), religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history, and to promote national unity or solidarity.
In this context: the Cultural form of a focus on self-reliance and the core tenets of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. And partly contains such things as the tradition of a Northern European-derived work ethic and two-parent household**. There's certainly some that take it to have an ethnic component, but fair few of the elected got primaried while guys like Richard Spencer have flipped to supporting Biden as Trump's been taking people away from him by giving people a non-ethnic cultural identity to latch onto.
**Right wing being labelled as anti-LGBT+ is kinda wrong, as there's actually decent acceptance of the LGB part, but stand against the T+. And even here there tends to be the asterisk of most of it being about education with prepubescant kids (which extends to the LGB) as they have the perspective of 'all this is sexual and kids have no business being exposed to that'. Though T+ also tends to get hit harder on that front of 'this is huge and they haven't even hit puberty', 'massive changes to body that we really don't have good data on the long term effects of', and 'everything is too broad and would allow for some creep/rapist to falsely claim to do creepy shit to the opposite sex.'
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As a side note, Bernie's 2016 platform was born of largely the same pressures, and could likely have won from splitting the hand grenade vote that went solidly Trump in the actual given the opposition was Hillary. However, over the past four years, starting with his endorsement of Hillary and we found out a lot of stuff being rigged so he wouldn't win, he started to get a bit more subverted by the establishment, and so lost his hand grenade to the establishment status. Something that with more fuckery killed his 2020 bid.
And as a further side note, the effective collapsing state the Democrats kinda got themselves into thanks to Bernie charging everyone up but then leaving no clear leader after, likely would have been where the Republicans would have gone if Bernie managed to get the nomination then White House from Trump having charged up his side.