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Arainach

>give him welfare and a system to blame, and he'll happily and loyally stay down forever.

So.....farmers?

The welfare tropes are so exhaustingly played out, especially when all data shows that red voters get far more welfare.

https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal...

This applies in most states at the local level too:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/why-are-w...

Also, you're ignoring the voters who explicitly tell us why they're voting that way: "he's not hurting the people he needs to be": https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...

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The data shows that states with red voters also have high welfare rates. That's very different than showing that red voters get more welfare.

Given that welfare recipients are among the minority in every single state, it's very possible that the welfare recipients are voting majority blue and still losing their state elections

To support what you are saying, I found this article: https://wallstreetpit.com/89671-are-welfare-recipients-mostl...

"Hardly surprising, we see that in a two-party split, 60-80% of welfare recipients are Democrats, while full time Workers are evenly divided between parties."

That's a very narrow definition of "welfare". Farm subsidies are welfare, as are corporate loan guarantees, pro sports stadiums, tax breaks for the energy industry and so on, and those overwhelmingly benefit red states.

And who can forget "don't let the government get ahold of my Medicare"? Conservative voters love to believe that the only good welfare is the welfare that benefits them (similar to how "cancel culture" is bad until it's time to ban books from school libraries and so many other hypocrisies).

Where's the evidence?

If you trust Vox to give you insight into Republican voters, then I cannot take you any more seriously than if I cited a Federalist article to tell you why people voted for Biden. My trust for the Guardian is only slightly higher than for Vox, but I find this article at least seems far more balanced: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/why-did-peop...

It includes things like:

* Voters felt Trump was more genuine than Hillary. That's not hard to believe. Trump is raw and real to a fault. Hillary is a corrupt career politician.

* Make America prosperous again. Democrats like to ignore history that shows that conservative presidents bring far more prosperity; leftist presidents destroy prosperity.

* Trump was the best or only conservative option. In general, the best reason to vote for a candidate is simply that the other candidate is worse.

* A reaction to Obama. Thomas Sowell at the time believed Obama was the U.S. worst president ever. While not a historian myself, I am inclined to take the opinion seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UpiNiaak18&list=WL&index=1&...

And, if you are sick of the welfare tropes, you probably need more Sowell in your life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdwXoKTW3Ew

> Democrats like to ignore history that shows that conservative presidents bring far more prosperity; leftist presidents destroy prosperity.

Oh man, this was my 8th grade understanding in a Republican household.

However it's not very hard to look at the US economy and debt under Clinton, then Bush, then Obama as recent, alternating, and stark differences. Clinton had one of the best US economies in history with a budget surplus, Bush squandered that on wars and the 08 recession. Obama picked up the pieces of a recession and brought us back to economic strength from the brink.

Then there's the crucial point in history where the three consecutive conservative presidencies, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover led us to the Great Depression vs. FDR's birth of the modern American middle class...

(Yes, I read and appreciate Sowell. And when I say the president's names, I mean their administration's policies.)

Well sowell blames the depression first on hoover for doing the very progressive thing of interfering with the economy and he made things worse. Sowell also states that all of FDR's policies made everything worse as well.

Similarly, sowell believes democrats caused the 08 recession via affirmative action housing policies and that Obama put the economy into a a coma until trump got things back in order. Sowell is an economist by trade, by the way.

We can both agree the economy thrived under Clinton, and I would add bush senior. Clinton was a rarity for being relatively fiscally responsible.

Are you sowell speaking in the third person or do you just base everything you believe in one author?

If sowell had a cookbook I bet I could guess your diet.

The Sowell diet! You guessed it! I can't help it if he's the best source to cite for many current social issues. It's not like diversifying my sources would change your mind.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=111 There you go. Another author explaining how FDR only made things worse.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-obama-recovery-took-so-...

Here's another author explaining how Obama damaged our economy. And of course Biden is damaging it even further.

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