Originally Posted by Some guy on the internets
A common question I hear people ask, usually to mock poor, white conservatives, is “Why do these people vote against their own self-interest?” In many ways, it is a valid and perplexing question. Poor whites stand the most to gain from economic policies like Biden’s, which grant child credits to families, freeze taxes for those making under $400K, provide Covid-19 relief to hardest hit areas, rebuild crumbling infrastructures such as bridges and highways in rural communities, and offer lowered costs for Medicare, to name just a few. All of these would tend to help the reddest of the red states and their inhabitants.
Yet these regions typically show the highest loyalty to Trump and the GOP. Many point to endemic racism, to the culture wars over abortion and trans rights, and to notions of individuality and freedom wrapped up in things like the anti-mask movement and the preservation of an unfettered second amendment right to own guns of all kinds.
But perhaps these are just indicia of a more generalized principle: People don’t vote their *self* interest, they vote their *group* interest.
Political opinions are not reasoned through and arrived at, they are more typically worn like badges of honor that identify you with your group, whether its party, religion or community. The more proudly you display them (think bumper stickers and T-shirts) the stronger you signal your loyalty to the group.
Uncomfortable facts that run contrary to a professed belief (such as that the GOP wants to gut the Affordable Care Act on which you and your family depend) are resisted by the group so effectively that *any* contrary statements, even if totally incorrect, often will be cited and clung to in order to justify the belief (e.g. my rates would have gone up even more under ObamaCare, which is socialism!) This quest for evidence can grow increasingly absurd, to the point where people believe the most fantastical of lies (think QAnon) in order to support their groupthink. This is in fact the cornerstone of cultish behavior.
If you’re hoping to win poorer folks on the far right over, it’s not useful to argue in the abstract that the Democrats will help them out the most. But there is a wide section of the population that is persuadable. That persuasion is not so much based on facts around economic policies, but on how those same policies are demonstrably actually helping *other* people out in their communities, people they might like and respect. If someone in their own community says that the child care tax credit or the ACA saved their family, community members may listen.
Another very effective way to get the message through is to have celebrities, such as actors, singers and well-known authors, carry the torch. People *want* to see themselves aligned with the people they admire. This is why it actually does matter quite a bit for people like Taylor Swift or BTS to take a political stand. For those who don’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics, but know that they respect these artists tremendously, new political opinions can form as the mind races to justify why they like them. (This is also why cancel culture and deplatforming is such a hot issue for radical conservatives.)
It also nearly goes without saying that telling people they are stupid for voting against their own pocketbook isn’t going to persuade them. They also aren’t dumb so much as manipulated, and in fairness liberals do much the same retrenching when faced with facts that run counter to their political ideology and set of beliefs about their leaders. The problem with liberalism is that it seeks to establish itself based on reason and fact, when these things demonstrably are not the things the typical human brain uses to arrive at a decision, whether it’s what to eat for lunch or who to vote for.
I make enough money lately as a business owner to put myself in a higher tax bracket, and yet I vote against my own economic self-interest all the time. I do this because I believe in the ideals of my own group, which espouses equality of opportunity and fairer division of wealth. These values are apparently more important to me than my own pocketbook. Am I delusional? I would like to think not. I can make a post-hoc argument about how my self-interest is really served by supporting redistributive economic policies and high marginal taxes, but that really just is confirmation of a pre-existing desire to see myself as a person with certain values. I cannot argue with the idea that I regularly place the ideals of my group (liberal Democrat) above my own economic self-interest.
The same goes for those on the other side of the political spectrum. Understanding where this stubborn and seemingly illogical behavior arises, and how best to address and deal with it, is essential for us to win a majority of voters to our side.