[mkl95]

> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.

It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.

[verandaguy]

Right, but both of those examples are terrible ideas on their face.

On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.

And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.

As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.

[underlipton]

Not that I disagree, but it should be asked: Retribution for what? The answers are, generally:

>COVID restrictions

>The state of the economy

>The state of culture, broadly-speaking

>Letting a black man become president, and the attendant ramifications (intrinsic and extrinsic, cause and effect)

I'll leave it to readers to judge. (You can probably guess what I, as a progressive, think of these impetuses, in driving half-ish of the country to vote for everything Trump embodies. And, frankly, what drove the other half-ish of the country to vote for Biden and Harris.)

[embedding-shape]

> Americans voted for Trump hoping

There was like 70 million Americans who voted for Trump, most likely for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes multiple reasons and sometimes probably even conflicting reasons. People are complicated, saying that half a country did something because of some few reasons usually over-simplifies so much it gets harder for you to actually understand what is happening/happened.

[mkl95]

From an EU perspective it can look complicated. But when you look at the data, the American electorate is relatively simple-minded. For example: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...

[embedding-shape]

Why would "EU perspective" make it look more or less complicated? People are people everywhere, regardless of country.

> the American electorate is relatively simple-minded

It's favorable for many people who don't agree with the current administration to believe so, I'm not sure how true it is in practice, and again, I believe believing so might hurt your chances of actually understanding things properly. That sort of bias really get in the way.

> https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...

> findings from our post-election survey among 5,000 self-reported 2024 general election voters

Again, more than 70 million Americans voted for Trump, you're not gonna gain any understanding from a self-reported survey of ~2500 people.

[mkl95]

> you're not gonna gain any understanding from a self-reported survey of ~2500 people

A sample size of ~2500 is statistically huge - the margin of error is very small. You should sign up to a stats course.

[embedding-shape]

You should head outside and actually talk with real humans, no stats course is gonna teach you human understanding.

[gpvos]

Self-reported though; that throws a huge spanner in the works.