First of all I probably need to change my screen name since I recently moved from NJ to NC. This of course puts me in the middle of a battleground state.
Now Hillary has been running an advertisement on a regular basis showing children watching Donald Trump speak. They show the speech where he mocks and ridicules a disabled reporter. They show a speech where he drops an F bomb. They show a speech where he talks about blood coming out of a female journalist’s whatever.
But it starts out with Trump saying “I could shoot someone in the middle of Times Square and it would not cost me any votes”.
Think about that for a minute. He is basically saying that his supporters are so blind and so gullible that anything he says or does would be excused by his supporters. Remember this is the same man who famously touted “I love the poorly educated”.
And this is born out in polls. Hillary is ahead by over 20 points among people with a college education while Trump is ahead by a similar margin with people who have only a high school diploma or less.
This is in a nutshell why Republicans are always fighting programs that make college more affordable and programs that support education in general. If you look at the traditional red states almost all of them rank in the bottom half in terms of the quality of education and the number of people moving on to secondary education. This is not a flaw in policy it is the design of the policy.
The key to Republican success is playing on peoples prejudices and keeping them so uninformed and uneducated that they cannot interpret or understand economic policies or wrap their heads around scientific research that backs the concept of global warming.
Democracy only works when you have an educated and informed electorate. People will often vote in their own self interest which is understandable. But when you can convince people to believe that cutting taxes to the richest and that government is only there to take your money, then you are able to get them to vote in a way that is absolutely contradictory to their own self interests.