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I think your point about insurance premiums is spot on.

A $100-200/month increase isn't much when you live in a high cost of living area with higher salaries, but when you live in a low cost of living area with lower salaries, that $100-200/month might be a huge percentage change in your monthly expenditures.

People who are on employee-sponsored health plans don't understand how expensive healthcare is for low-income self-employed and low-income self-insured people.

It's still misplaced anger, because the GOP refuses to expand medicare or to allow collective bargaining to push costs down. Voting GOP because Obamacare is mediocre makes no sense because the GOP has no intention (and literally no plan) to fix any of the problems with Obamacare.

Besides, the towns with 30k average income didn't vote for Trump, they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Trump did well in middle America among 70k household income families.

There is also a large gap between how angry people are at Obamacare and at the American Care Act. They're the same thing, of course, but only Obamacare makes people seethe with rage. So clearly the GOP has been successful in poisoning the healthcare debate.

I bunch of things you talk about show all the symptoms of the bubble effect.

People don't believe in things because they personally analyzed everything and came to a conclusion.

You don't believe that a fossil in a museum is 5,000 years old, or a painting is truly made by Da Vinci 500 years ago, you trust 'experts', even though your own intuition would be against it.

So for instance, if I showed you a painting and asked you if you believe that it was painted by Da Vinci, you may agree with the statement, but once you hear from the experts, you realize that it is a fake, then you'd change your opinion.

It would be patently dishonest for me to go out and perform survey of people by showing them a fake da Vinci and getting a 75% affirmative answer that it is a real da vinci and then claiming "75% of the people believe that it's a real Da Vinci painting, but because 'experts' say that it's fake, nobody wants to come see it in my private museum".

Same goes here, when asked, most conservatives might be ok with the individual Obamacare mandates like "Would it be better if your kids are allowed to be on your health insurance until they are 26", once they hear from the people they trust that this means health insurance premiums would go up, then they would be oppose it.

I totally agree that my observations are symptomatic of a bubble. That doesn't change that there are a meaningful differences between bubbles. People who blindly trust scientific consensus live in a bubble, but it's the best kind of bubble.

The Obamacare scenario you describe doesn't match up with reality. It's not true that they oppose Obamacare on rational grounds (e.g. I don't want my insurance to go up). Obamacare is the republican solution to health insurance, it's a federal version of Romneycare. Republicans should love it, because it's their own program, but they hate it. This hatred for Obamacare is the product of relentless fear-mongering by the right wing press and talk radio. What's going on here is much more serious than just groups of people living in their own bubble and consuming their own kind of media. Bubbles aren't a new thing, embracing a fact-free worldview is.

And Romneycare is a state-level implementation of the mandate-and-subsidy proposal that various national Republicans and the insurance industry came up with as the recommended national healthcare policy in the wake of the failure of the Clinton plan in the 1990s when there was still pressure for a national policy.

Of course, by sometime in Bush's Presidency, the dominant proposal among Republicans who thought there should be a national policy (which was a shrinking number) had evolved: it was still a mandate and subsidy plan, but now restricted to high-deductible plans tied to HSAs.

> Obamacare is the republican solution to health insurance, it's a federal version of Romneycare. Republicans should love it, because it's their own program, but they hate it.

When I used the word 'bubble', it really was applicable to you.

People who raise the same points you've raised are so out of touch with anyone who doesn't agree with them already.

When was the last time you met someone who could be convinced with the following argument:

"Hey believer-of-X-ideology, you should support idea Y because it is actually a part of X ideology because one of the prominent leaders of the X ideologists supported it".

Romney is a blue state Republican, which is different than a red state Republican. I'm sure Republicans in Massachussetts or California would all be ok with Obamacare, but the states in which Romney would never be a governor, they hate Obamacare for the idea it represents.

There is no possible plan for healthcare to the right of Romneycare, because it is already the most conservative way to provide healthcare to people: for profit insurance, for profit hospitals, for profit pharma, with a mandate for healthy people to buy insurance on a market. Romneycare is essentially what Nixon proposed way back (it got rejected by the Dems at the time because they insisted on universal healthcare).

People who are to the right of Romney like Cruz or Ryan are opposed to the idea that government should provide healthcare, a position so radical that no republican held it 30 years ago.

Thanks for sharing. Can you elaborate on #1. I never really understood the level of hatred Hillary received. To me she seemed like any other politician.

Off the top of my head ... whitewater, healthcare during Clinton presidency (people didn't think the first lady should have such a large role in public policy), Hillary demonizing Bill's female accusers, "landing under sniper fire" in Bosnia, Vince Foster's death, Benghazi deaths, Benghazi root cause (particularly the initial narrative that it was due to the youtube video). Also the sense that it was "her turn" -- a sense of entitlement -- it was obvious the Democratic Party Leadership was "granting" her the nomination.

Part of it I think, too, is the rise of Rush Limbaugh and the right radio who wanted to undermine Bill Clinton, so they incessantly attacked both Hillary and Bill.

This also might begin to explain a little of the heart of the sentiment:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437345/hillary-clinton...

Another aspect I forgot is that the Clinton's have often been unnecessarily secretive. For example, they weren't forthcoming about her pneumonia. Some thought that even the email server was driven by a desire to be secretive, even when not necessary.

This behavior tends to make people suspicious -- but on the other hand, people were also out to discredit them.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/26/cnn-host-wikileaks-showed-...

It seems like the GOP picked her as a target when she was First Lady and never, ever let up on demonizing her. Unsurprising that 20 years of destructive characterization stuck.

She did herself no favors by being more or less a typical politician in a lot of regards. When you're trying to defeat that much mudslinging, it's helpful to behave above reproach.

Hillary has had a very long career with many highs and many lows, so there really isn't a single reason anymore on why she is hated; many people have many reasons that may go back 30 years or more. Here are some google hits on why:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-womack/stop-pretending-y...

Are they good reasons? Should I be hating her?

No, but that wasn't the question. If we could run a collective by facts and optimal herd ideology, democracy would be obsolete.

The only thing we can do is understand WHY something happens, then try to work to change it (if it's bad, which is an entirely different can of worms of a problem).

>> If we could run a collective by facts and optimal herd ideology, democracy would be obsolete.

Haha! Yes, democracy would be very obsolete, and also just about everything else that makes a society more than one giant ant-bee-termite-like hive mind.

I'll be honest; I don't entirely understand it, either.

The general sentiment is that she's a crook and corrupt to a much, much greater degree than other politicians.

Conservative talk radio, and other similar media, have spent decades vilifying her. According to them, she has helped her husband prey on women, has had people killed to cover up crimes, is trying to push for a takeover of the US by the United Nations, and much, much more.

Not much of this is connected to reality, but that just doesn't matter.

The part about her helping her husband prey on women has at least some truth to it. There's no shortage of women over the decades who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault; I think it's rather silly to claim that Billy is completely innocent. So just as with any rapist, a woman who insists on staying married to such a man and backing him up in public can be seen as "enabling" him.

Honestly, I don't think all this anti-Hillary stuff is unfair either. There's no shortage of Democrat politicians who do NOT have all the baggage that either Bill or Hillary have accumulated over the years. What kind of dirt does anyone have on Al Gore, for instance? Conservatives might disagree about his environmental claims, and some people might still be mad about his ex-wife's record lyrics labeling campaign (but he and Tipper got divorced some time ago, so I think it's unfair to hold him to that now), but that's about it. I've certainly never heard of him sexually assaulting women. And I can say the same about most Democratic politicians, famous or not. So why did the DNC insist on picking a candidate with so much baggage? They're really the ones to blame for losing this election.

I don't think it is so much staying married as it is actively enabling him by working to discredit his accusers. She was an active participant in formulating the strategies to discredit them:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435941/hillary-clinton...

I'm not talking about "enabling" like not getting a divorce, I mean stuff like having witnesses killed.

I became convinced this past fall that the criticism was utterly unfair, because her fiercest opponents could never come up with anything beyond "emails" and "Benghazi" over and over again.

In any case, it doesn't matter whether it's fair, they shouldn't have run her. If she's widely hated then that affects things regardless of whether it's "fair."

The frustrating part about this, of course, is that while Hillary was accused of being an enabler, Trump has been accused of not only being an admitted sexual assaulter but actually raping an underage girl. Not "merely" statutory rape either.

Such a proud day for our country when he was elected.

Such a proud day for our country back in November when we had these two "fine" people running against each other for the highest office in the land.

Honestly, if Hillary was the best we could do for an opposing candidate, then maybe we deserve Trump, if not someone much worse.

The rest of the world didn't deserve Trump.

The rest of the world doesn't have Trump; only Americans do. The rest of the world is free to dis-entangle their economies from America's if they wish. Honestly, I feel the rest of the industrialized world has been too complacent for too long, letting America take the lead on everything from military defense (against the likes of Russia) to medical research to space exploration, and then whining when America doesn't do as well as they think it should. Instead of whining about how America does a terrible job with manned space exploration and hasn't been back to the Moon in decades, why don't they pool their resources and send their own manned missions there and build a Moon base or something? (Asteroid capture and mining would be a great idea with actual commercial potential.) The EU alone has over 500M people, and all of Europe has 743M according to a quick Google search. Japan has 127M people. The US only has 310M. So Europe+Japan combined have almost 3x as many people as the US. Toss Canada and Australia/NZ in there and the US is a clear minority. Instead of whining about the US's failings, everyone else needs to work harder on cooperating with each other and surpassing the US, instead of growing increasingly irrelevant in comparison to Russia and China.

In part it's likely because she's married to Bill Clinton. She's basically seen as an example of a political 'dynasty' in the same way as George HW Bush, George W Bush and Jeb Bush. Part of an 'establishment' that doesn't seem like it'll change very much, especially when contrasted to Trump's claims of draining the swamp and overthrowing the system.

When you get a government security clearance, you sign an SF312 (non-disclosure agreement) where, among other things, you agree to safeguard classified information and acknowledge that you understand the criminal penalties for negligent handling.

Then she's caught sending & receiving classified info through a personal email server.

Any normal person would expect to land in jail immediately under those circumstances.

This isn't just unethical behavior, it's flat-out criminal.

> Things are tight, taxes are scary

The economic angle is what I understand least about the Republican voter base. A core part of the Republican platform is that we should be cutting government services and programs in order to lower taxes. But these cuts disproportionately affect the poor. The whole point of these programs is to provide a social safety net for the most vulnerable.

So I understand why the rich would vote Republican but I'm confused by the groundswell support for Trump among those struggling to pay their bills. It seems like they're voting against their own interests. How did the pro-business, small-government faction gain such traction among the people who have the most to gain from the redistribution of wealth via higher taxes?

Is it purely because of the parties' positions on abortion, immigration, defense, marriage, etc?

My experience is that Republicans generally don't view it through the lens of "what will I get back from the government."

At least in the town I was living, there's "what I make" and there's "what the government takes" and that's the end of the equation.

Most people I knew who qualified for government assistance wouldn't even apply for it. Partially out of pride, occasionally out of ignorance, partially out of a fierce independence.

It's called morality. Not taking what is not yours to take, when you can earn it yourself.

> They are sick of "coastal elites" running their lives and pretending like everything is OK. Small towns are hurting. A lot. Realize the median household income in the town I came from is <$30k and the average number of people in each house is 6, and you'll understand why people are livid about Obamacare increasing insurance costs (after so many promised it wouldn't do so). Things are tight, taxes are scary, and when the seemingly rich, out-of-touch people are hand-wavy about increasing the single biggest expense by 50% when you're barely making it (food/housing is cheap) you get the hatred for Obamacare.

Why aren't they on expanded Medicaid?

All of this.

I too came from a very rural area[1], and my analysis exactly coincides with yours.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boone_County,_Arkansas

> They are so fucking tired of identity politics. Oversensitivity, calling everything "-ist" to win an argument, trying to tie racism into everything.

I've thought of this and wondered is it actually possible that racism and sexism is rampant?

In Eastern Europe, racism is utterly rampant (dismissal of achievements of people based on their ethnicity, wide spread belief that people of a certain ethnic type are 'bad for the country', casual disdain to out-group members). However racism is also utterly accepted, and thus invisible to the casual eye because in practice many people constantly make exceptions to their world view. They're racist in general and chant slurs when drunk, but polite to their neighbors from Nigeria because "those are the good ones".

Perhaps the same is true in the US. Just look at companies like Uber, and how institutions can be warped to protect sexual harassers. Those individuals aren't some great 'other'. Those are our friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, and yes sometimes they are even 'us'. Yet outside of smoking gun situations, we don't see them as even potentially 'sexist'.

So sexism could be rampant. Racism could be rampant.

However, calling people out on said fact, is not useful for anything except for fostering feelings of self-righteousness. What is most effective, as we can see from the US Civil Rights movement of the 60s, is focusing on common ground, and using that as a motivator toward egalitarianism. In my very own state, the KKK was utterly destroyed by the fact that they wanted to beat up elementary-school children, and whilst some people might have been casually racists they drew the line against beating up 7 year olds and thus could be motivated to repudiate even less extreme positions simply because the KKK was also for them. What brought us all together was the feeling that 'we are all human beings who value our families, and love our children'.

What I see with current day liberals (and conservatives actually too) is that the platform lacks unity.

Thus rather than being able to build bridges, bridges are often burned pre-emptively by more 'extreme' segments of the group.

Organizations like Black Lives Matter also draw inspiration from the 60s Civil Rights movement, but they have concluded (correctly, in my view) that relentlessly opposing and calling out racism is enormously effective. Black Lives Matter is so successful that their message has reached almost every single American.

What I worry is whether the message is being recieved in the right way. Are people hearing and understanding or are they hearing and reacting to it badly?

1. Why do they hate her?

2. Do they consider him not racist/sexist because they are a little bit too? (Not trying to be inflammatory)

3. I hate it too.

4b. Why are they hurting? Why is median household income so low?

4b.Why are they hurting? Why is median household income so low?

Well, in the small town I grew up in, cheap imports and exported labor coupled with automation killed the main sources of jobs. Retraining is incredibly hard and requires a willingness to uproot everything and risk it all as well as the ability to not get paid for a while to move forward.

Uprooting is harder than it seems too. House and property valuations plummet shortly after the company propping up a "company town" departs. Finding a potential home buyer in a dying town becomes quite difficult, for adults, leaving becomes equivalent to walking away from everything, including a mortgage.

I live in a small deep-red town, so I'll try to give my take on a few here.

2. Imagine you lived in a town where 99% of the population is not racist, but that 1% that is racist is blatantly so. They don't do thing subtly, but they openly use racial slurs and make it known that they don't like or trust people of a certain ethnicity.

Now imagine someone comes into town and when they happen to see someone of color they subtly walk to the other side of the road, or quickly double check to make sure their wallet is still there after they pass by.

To many (most?) people in the town, they likely wouldn't perceive this as being racist at all. Racism to them is walking into the passerby intentionally and saying something crude like, "Watch where you are going, *!"

When you spend your entire life thinking that this is what a racist is, Trump can seem incredibly tame by comparison.

Now we can get into a completely different discussion about whether those people truly are racist for not recognizing racism, not ostracizing the few blatantly racist people, etc, but in my experience nearly all of those people are making a genuine effort to be accepting of others and aren't intentionally racist. They have just grown up in a completely different environment/culture than what you would get growing up in a city, and their opinion of what is racism isn't the same as yours.

4. Where I grew up, something like 75% or more of the jobs were at factories. Toys, factory equipment, bicycles, fiberglass, metal, etc all came out of the town. And the people working these jobs weren't lazy - they would work 60+ hours every week, often working Saturdays, long overlapping shifts, and the factory would run 24/7. They even dealt with dangerous equipment (it isn't uncommon to see people missing fingers here) where they needed to pay attention to what they were doing all the time without any additional compensation. But they were happy. They could provide for their family. They could make enough to pay for a $100k house and their wife could stay at home and watch the kids because he likely was working and couldn't help out. Wages were never amazing, but they got by.

Now for whatever reason - automation, outsourcing, immigration, or whatever else - many of those jobs are gone, and now these people who previously would bust their asses to get by are still trying to bust their asses, but they are all fighting for the few jobs remaining. Wages are down (more workers than are needed by jobs). Spouses are working to try to help pay the bills. Despite all of that, things just don't look like they are getting better anytime soon. There simply aren't enough jobs available for them.

In cities service jobs can often help fill this gap, but in small towns it typically isn't enough. And many people don't want to, or can't afford to move. They are already barely able to pay their $400/mo mortgage and nobody would want to move to their prospect free town, so who are they going to sell their house to? They have grandparents in the area who need their help. They have kids 6 years into school with friends they don't want to uproot. So they do what they can, take what work they can, and get by hoping and praying that someone will take notice of their struggle and try to help them out. And the median income continues to decrease.

2. This town exists - Harrison, Arkansas. I do a mental eyeroll every time I hear someone call someone else a racist over some trivial difference in political opinion. I grew up with real racists around. Mere prejudice pales in comparison.

2. That makes sense.

4. Definitely a horrible situation to be in. What do they/you think Trump has promised to do that might make an actual difference?

All the factories left town, because those businesses could do what they do cheaper in China or Vietnam or Singapore or Mexico.

Trump promised to put big taxes on goods coming in from overseas, and on companies who close US factories to move operations to other countries. It's a simple, direct assault on the immediate causes of the problems of these communities, and something no national politician has dared to consider in recent memory.

Experts and mainstream politicians warn that this kind of policy will cause a global depression. But these are the same experts and mainstream politicians who've told these people that the globalization which destroyed their communities is good for them. What they say so plainly contradicts these communities' first hand experience, that it's really hard to believe them.

Honestly, I think just acknowledging that they are struggling and saying that he wanted to help won Trump a lot of voters. When you feel ignored or unheard by the other party that is enough.

Your answers have a lot of insight. As a blue-state city kid, I've been struggling to even comprehend how a Trump supporter can even exist let alone understand how he was elected. From your response I can start to understand where they're coming from. Thank you.

re: 1 I think it's 2 fold:

a) A really successful propagation of lies regarding her. I live in Ohio and get junk mail all the time, some of it is just absurd. They make claims about the terrorist attacks she allowed while "in office" as sec of state. Makes no sense.

b) They are quite possibly right and she is the worst. Look into the death of Vince Foster, whitewater, her suspicious reasons for hiding her email from the us government. There's A LOT of circumstantial evidence that she is beyond corrupt.

> But they like their way of life, they don't want yours, and want politicians to generally leave them alone and let them be.

Umm - they want to be left alone, let be, let them live their lives where they are, yet they are complaining about not being heard...

...can you have it both ways?