we all (rightly) make fun of neolibs and their total inability to comprehend politics and what people want, and commend our own ability to use dialectical materialism to understand trends and voting patterns

but given how many stories there are of like:

"I voted for Trump/Harris but voted for the other side down ballot because we need more balance in this polarized country"

or "I don't even really know who the president is right now and haven't been paying attention to the races but I guess I'll vote for Trump/Harris because I saw a funny meme from their camp"

or "that RFK guy is so well-spoken and he has a great platform, we need more of that Kennedy energy to heal our divided nation"

and so on. I honestly feel at some times like the brainworms are the electorate and maybe economic/social issues mean quite little. I understand that only a tiny minority of people care even a quarter as much about politics as we do but there's so much utterly inexplicable shit that seems totally against any rational explanation of human behaviour. we could put together a stunningly detailed analysis of how wage growth and inflation have influenced voting patterns across America this election, and we'd be like 80% correct, but it'll turn out that the real reason why Harris lost a state wasn't because of inflation or abortion or Gaza or anything like that, but because some religious conservative radio host (that none of us have ever heard of but has a base of 20 million people somehow) told everybody on november 4th that if you don't vote for Trump, you're going to hell, and half a million Harris voters shifted to Trump because of that

basically I have no fucking clue what is going on inside the brains of - if I'm being extremely optimistic - 75% of Americans. like, if you offered me 10 million dollars on the spot to write up a convincing explanation - using all of my Marxist diamat political knowledge - of why people vote for the Democrats on some parts of their ballots and the Republicans on others, I simply would not be able to do so. and we really need to make sure that we interview as many of these people as possible so that future generations have a written record of how indescribably baffling the early-to-mid 21st century was. ongoing events will fuel psychological/sociological studies for the next 500 fucking years.