You have a different definition of “wildly unpopular” than I do.
By comparison Friederich Merz, the German Chancellor, has a 13% approval rating. Emanuel Macron, the French President, has an approval rating of 18% . Those are politicians I would call wildly unpopular, not people with almost 40% approval. The sad fact is that quite a lot of Americans approve of this.
America has long curated and groomed gullible people to be anti-Enlightenment. To distrust science and facts and critical thinking.
These people are the base. They are the W/Sarah Palin/Nixon floor - the people that approve of the Republican no matter how awful and inept and unqualified the candidate is. When Hillary was talking about “deplorables”, she was talking about this core group.
My guess is that since education here is so hollowed out and so many snake-handlers do things like home-schooling, teaching nothing but the bible, and we still allow white-flight schools so that the insular world they seek is nearly complete - and that as a result we have more of these kinds of people than other countries.
You have a different definition of “wildly unpopular” than I do.
By comparison Friederich Merz, the German Chancellor, has a 13% approval rating. Emanuel Macron, the French President, has an approval rating of 18% . Those are politicians I would call wildly unpopular, not people with almost 40% approval. The sad fact is that quite a lot of Americans approve of this.
40% is an extremely low approval rating in a two-party electoral college system like the US.
In the US, each election is only really decided by 10% of non-partisan Americans, who live in the swing states.
90% of other votes don’t matter, because those are permanently blue or permanently red states, and they cancel each other out.
So for Trump to lose 10% of Americans would mean to lose 100% of people who decide election outcomes.
America has long curated and groomed gullible people to be anti-Enlightenment. To distrust science and facts and critical thinking.
These people are the base. They are the W/Sarah Palin/Nixon floor - the people that approve of the Republican no matter how awful and inept and unqualified the candidate is. When Hillary was talking about “deplorables”, she was talking about this core group.
My guess is that since education here is so hollowed out and so many snake-handlers do things like home-schooling, teaching nothing but the bible, and we still allow white-flight schools so that the insular world they seek is nearly complete - and that as a result we have more of these kinds of people than other countries.