2016 Postmortem

So the social safety net is of secondary concern. They want to have better paying jobs and have been taught to believe that the government robs them of freedoms. Since they believe in the private sector and have been taught to distrust government, they believe the GOP claims that the reason they have problems finding good paying jobs is that the government prevents business from succeeding and is stealing their freedoms. So they vote GOP. The power of GOP ideology is strong.

Now they don't realize that they really getting the freedom to starve or be sick, or that removing regulations just allows corporate malfeasance and does not produce jobs. Lowering taxes on the rich and corporations also has only minimal impact on quality job creation. In fact more freedom allows the jobs to leave more easily to places with less costly workers. So they are really voting against their interests, while believing they are voting for them.

Trump however partially breaks the GOP freedom spell, by saying that freedom (free trade) can do damage-- it's a direct populist assault on traditional GOP ideology, and we will see how that affects the parties and the electorate. But with the likelihood of the dismantling of the safety net, many of the poor GOP voters are going to be in for a big surprise when the services they need are no longer available and the new high paying jobs do not materialize.