I have written the following ideas several times before, so apologies if you've read this before. But if you take Texas and Oklahoma (very generally speaking here, and excluding islands of big cities and college towns) and just sweep to the East right to the sea, you have a massive bastion of some of the most racist and ignorant white people collected anywhere on the planet. Historical reasons are there, but also with a cultivation of a myriad of bad qualities that just have festered over many recent decades. I once started a thread about it on the old ZZL, but this vast area features ("features") extreme ignorance of science, extreme distrust and rejection of education generally and hatred for higher education specifically, bad health problems, poverty along with ideological rejection of any government help for the poor--an ironic situation seeded and cultivated by corporate powers in collusion with the Republican Party.
Next, elections are about motivating constituents in various factions to simply get up and go vote, and this is framed of course by unfortunately low voter participation in America, because elected politicians often obey corporate power rather than the will of the general public. List a dozen policy goals of the Democratic Party and majorities of Americans, including in the South, are for them, but suddenly not if they know they are of the Democrats--then no, they reject them. This is likewise cultivated by corporate power ideology and elected Republicans.
Set this rotten kettle of fish aside for the moment, here. Since the Republican "Southern Strategy" (simply, get all the Democrats in the South who are racist and ignorant to all vote Republican), and it's success, there was added to it a new gargantuan success ("success") of Trump emerging in 2016. Like no one has ever seen, like no one imagined, he got every single white racist, in every level of society, with the American South as a base, but up into all the Rust Belt as well... to get up and go vote for him, and for Republicans. This paired with lazy and insufficient numbers of Democratic voters getting up and going to vote with the same enthusiasm.
This is the essence of what has happened to turn American government into its current chaotic nightmare world, since 2016.
