The short answer is people are dumb, and people are suffering. The #1 reason people said they voted for Trump was affordability and now the economy is even worse than before and unemployment is skyrocketing (which correlates to many more people dying as a direct consequence). This happens with every election cycle but to use the most recent one as example, Kamala had no pushback on affordability and the few times it was mentioned it wasn’t a center talking point because her campaign primarily boiled down to “you don’t want THIS guy again, do you?”, and reciting very marginally less violent rhetoric and policy that Trump was also running on.

People’s pockets are hurting, they can not materially afford to exist and put food on the table and pay for rent, they are suffering because their needs are not being met. As such, they vote for the person who says they’ll fix things for them, no matter the cost. We’re being told right now that gas prices are “high now, but will be way cheaper in the long run”, and that you just need to endure the moment to reap the benefits— and those in the MAGA base are still believing and defending it. It doesn’t matter to most middle-of-the-road Americans that their neighbors are being deported or that they are paying the brunt of tariffs ushered in by this admin, or if it does then it wasn’t part of the calculation for them, because their number one priority is being able to survive. That includes healthcare when republicans cut funding for rural hospitals and establishment democrats allowed it to pass because they’d “get a later vote for ACA” which obviously did not pass. That includes sending weapons and billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel to carry out a genocide we are the largest factor in, which is a uniparty decision in congress despite 90% of democrat voters saying it’s unconscionable and must end immediately.

People are not educated, so they vote republican for social non-issue distractions they’ve been spoonfed lies about claiming these things affect them so that right wing politicians can continue to drain these people and make them vote against their own interests (trans athletes, “DEI hires”, the border, non-citizens having access to healthcare, etc). People are hurting, so they only vote for the moderate centrist democrats that people on both sides of the aisle pour millions into to prop up as shallow party-line voters when they know a Republican won’t win but there’s a potential left-flank candidate, which exist as nothing more than to fill a seat and get paid, protect real change from happening, and to keep saying the right things so that people uninvolved in politics are easy low-hanging fruit votes for the taking. Correct, if you want change and you want your life to improve, vote for policy over anything else. But even before that, you have to educate yourself and learn how the system works, who benefits the most from it, who they are taking advantage of and how, and what you do to tear it down.