Worst case of economic anxiety I’ve ever seen
By 
This is a profile of a Trump voter that is actually useful and illustrative:
“This,” Ted Johnson told me, “is what I hope.” We were here the other day at a bar not far from his house, and we were talking about Donald Trump and the possibility he could be the president again by this time next year. “He breaks the system,” he said, “he exposes the deep state, and it’s going to be a miserable four years for everybody.”
“For everybody?” I said.
“Everybody.”
“For you?”
“I think his policies are going to be good,” he said, “but it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart.”
[…]
He’s 58. He’s married to his second wife and has three young adult sons. He was in the Army for 22 years — he retired as a lieutenant colonel — and now he is a senior project manager for an IT security company and works from home. He lives in a classic three-bedroom house he bought almost four years ago for $485,000 that’s now worth roughly a quarter-million dollars more. He’s originally from Centralia, Illinois, a town like too many towns in the more rural interior of the country that isn’t what it was. He was born in a hospital that no longer delivers babies. His father’s gallbladder several years back broke during a snowstorm and so he couldn’t be airlifted to the closest suitable medical facility in St. Louis. “So we just watched him die,” he said. Before he voted for Trump twice, he told me, he voted for Barack Obama twice. By September of 2023, though, he was thinking he was ready for someone else and so he went to the event for Haley.
[…]
The rift with his brother remains — Ted and Fred Johnson don’t talk — but Ted and I talked for more than three hours.
The more he watched Haley, the less he liked her. She was too “scripted,” he said. She was “weak on the border,” he said. She was “a corporatist,” he said. She was “all in on Ukraine,” he said — echoing knowingly or not some of Trump’s attacks. Chris Sununu, the governor here, endorsed her. “That was a negative,” Johnson said. “He’s an elitist.” He liked the way Haley talked about abortion — “she threaded the needle, and she did a very good job on that.” But he came to not like her tone in her tussles with DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy during debates — a forum many felt she excelled in and credited for fueling her rise. “She should’ve took some higher ground when she started sparring with Vivek,” Johnson told me. “She came off worse because he doesn’t know any better,” he said.
[…]
“Can you help me understand more why the legal actions against President Trump have bothered you so much?” I asked.
“January 6th,” he said. “January 6th was staged.”
“By?”
“The Democratic Party,” he said. “Nancy Pelosi.”
The idea that Obama-Trump voters must by definition be gettable via marginal policy changes completely misunderstands the issue. Affluent Fox News grandpas aren’t looking for material things from the government, and there’s nothing Uncle Joe Brandon can do to force their estranged relatives to talk to them again. In theory, someone whose grandfather died should be amenable to arguments to expanding access to healthcare, but not when their takeaway is that “everyone needs to suffer more.”