No Stupid Questions

Put simply: They’re being lied to. Consistently and perniciously.

The lie is that their vote is going to benefit them somehow. Or that it’s going to hurt someone else exclusively. And, sometimes, it’s both—that it’ll hurt someone else, while bringing a benefit.

In all three cases, the real truth—that they themselves will still suffer—is neatly hidden away.

Informed consent: People are not against exploitation. They just want to switch sides. Why would you vote for something that cripples you once you got rich?

Uninformed consent: They honestly believe they are voting for their own interests.

Indifferent consent: Usually single issue or ideology-driven voter.

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In the US at least, the systematic demolishing of the education system has led to a vast reduction in overall education and critical thinking skills. This was done on purpose. That, combined with the unexpected boon of the Internet, has led to massive wealth shifting from the many to the few.

You see the results of this change everywhere, especially on the Internet. Lack of basic spelling and grammar skills are just one symptom. All of that is to say that humans are primates and easily trained.

The root of it is that we don't teach skepticism or critical thinking in public schools. Seriously.

Question authority. Question everything. But especially question authority. They rarely have your best interests in mind.

This is a complex question, but up front first and foremost in any Capitalist country, voting will always benefit the rich, even FDR style Social Democracy came about as concessions to prevent revolution in the context of a decimated working class and a rising USSR.

People, generally, vote along their class interests, but these are handled in a different manner depending on which country you are in. Using the US as an example, the DNC caters to social progressivism, while the GOP caters to social conservativism. On foreign policy, the GOP and DNC are near identical, and when it comes to domestic economic policy, the DNC caters slightly more to urban voters while the GOP caters to rural voters.

This is all, however, in the context of parties that function as businesses that sell policy to Capitalists. Both parties serve Capital, because Capital is what holds real power. It holds power over the media, the state, everything.

The answer to how to fix this is getting workers to organize. When workers organize, they raise their social and class awareness and can accomplish far more than atomized individuals can.

Ignorance and gullibility. I fall for misinformation all the time, especially when it confirms my own biases and it takes real effort to maintain a mindset of "yes this sounds true, but is it actually?" It is also terribly inefficient. If someone tells me, when I was a kid, that daddylonglegs spiders are the most poisonous, I am likely going to just go "neat" and now I think that and say it. If you stop and verify EVERYTHING EVER you have no time to do anything in life. This makes the filter of critical thinking.....critical.

Also, it isn't about being stupid (though that helps). Some of the smartest people I know are conspiracy theory nutjobs. They can easily draw parallels between disparate facts, but can't filter their findings or understand correlation doesn't equal causation.

Here are a few examples of what I've seen them do in the time I've been alive.

• Lowering the amount of educated people by various means such as cutting (on not properly increasing) funding, restricting access to it,...
• Limiting access to (somewhat) correct information by buying up news media outlets, severely influencing social media, telling people that their "alternative media" is the only way to get correct information, and so much more
• Actively pitting groups of people against each other, black vs white, immigrants vs citizens, women vs men,...

Propaganda. Lack of education. There's a reason they want to defund public schools. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. :)

Often when I see someone accusing people of voting against their own interests, it's pretty clear that the person making the accusation has not taken the time to understand the values others are basing their choice on.
If I could rob a person and be confident that I would never be caught and punished for doing so, am I acting against my own self interest if I chose not to rob them because it goes against my moral code? No, of course not. But based on the way some people talk about voting against ones self interest, you might think I just cheated myself out of free money. Is it possible that a person might "vote against their own interests" because of a misinformed view? of course, but you'll never understand a person's motivations by chosing to paint them with broad strokes based on your prejudices instead of getting to know them individually and trying to understand what it is they truly value.

Because they've been fooled into thinking it will either benefit them, or benefit people they feel "deserve it."

People get more upset about a bad friend than a real enemy.

This question is actually pretty old. Already ancient Greek / Roman philosophers discussed this.

Google the word 'anacyclosis' if you want to learn more. Alternatively here is a video link. I marked the position where the cycle explanation starts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY&t=371

The rich have billions to spend on focus groups so they know exactly which buttons to push so that people vote the way they want.

https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about

its not about red vs blue states. It's About The Country Vs. The City

A successful propaganda campaign by the owning class.

And a quote from an anonymous mutual:

many people will unfortunately need to learn this the hard way it seems at the expense of those who take the time to see the writing on the wall those ignorant to their exploitation will seldom listen to those who try to tell them how horribly theyre being fucked "if it were really so bad id notice" theyll say "this isnt so bad" theyll say, standing on the peak of the mountain that is dunning-kruger unknowing all we can do is wait, and watch to find out what what it is that throws them into the valley of unfathomable uncertainty in the meantime we must work for each other, for those who do see how good things could be. maybe then, our greener grass will coax them into giving us a fair listen

Because they want to see other people suffer

They get manipulated about and distracted by certain issues. The people who want power know this and exploit topics such as guns, abortion, fear of crime, racism/nationalism, sexism, economic issues and taxes. Plenty of people vote republican because they have been convinced that Democrats will take their guns, allow in too many immigrants (with the implicit idea that immigrants are bad somehow), be worse on the economy, raise taxes, let criminals get off easy, reduce the influence of Christianity, and so forth.

There’s also the decades of propaganda about socialism and communism, and against social safety nets as well as government and anything run by the government vs a private entity. So basically, because they’re not very aware or well informed and all themselves to be convinced by propaganda.

Do we actually vote to benefit the rich?

Many vote for leaders that openly cater to the rich, but I don’t know that we actually consciously vote to deliberately help the rich.

Those elected people are the ones telling everyone that the rich are the job creators. They used to feed us the farce that trickle-down was viable, they don’t even bother with the lie anymore. The rich are just squatters on wealth. They get that wealth by consolidating businesses, hoarding assets like real estate, creating artificial scarcity, enshittifying everything, and squeezing labor for more productivity while expending massive effort to minimize overall compensation.

And they own the media. All of it. Even the “liberal” media is mealy at best about taxing wealth or anything critical of the uber-wealthy, anything right of center is openly against tax, particularly of anyone with wealth, making the wealthy the “victims” of the left’s ideas while the wealthy are just parasites victimizing us all.

All that aside, the real crux of the issue is identity politics. Being a sycophant of the rich is no longer any different than being a evangelical supply-side Jesus CINO, pro-gun, anti-government, anti-tax, anti-environmental regs, blah blah and all the rest of the mulish conservative BS.

They don’t actually care if we cater to the rich. They care that their team says we should bend over and give the rich everything. Just like their team says school shootings are an acceptable price for having your own personal arsenal, or spreading a potentially deadly disease is better than being inconvenienced by closed restaurants.

Obstinate tribalism has gleefully supplanted critical thought.

The majority of people vote with their gut and won't look deep into what politician A is promising, so long as one of the promises is exactly the thing the person wants. For a considerable number of gamers, it's dealing with woke culture. Trump is a fervent enemy of "the woke", but he also promised hefty import tariffs on everything, so consoles can get really damn expensive. But hey, the woke sjw's are getting owned!!

This piece on Aftermath touches an important point as well, that left leaning content often takes care to not spout random bullshit, while right leaning will just say whatever because haha engagement goes brrrrrrr.

Going off a tangent, the Brazilian right complains that "the poor vote with their bellies", implying they'll vote for whoever promises "free money" or "free meals", usually in the form of govt programs. During election years, the right will try to claim they were the masterminds behind every sort of program meant to help poor people, such as Bolsa Familia, while loudly and constantly complaining about their existence and doing everything in their power to block money outside election years. It's common to find people who depend(ed) on Bolsa Familia to survive that complain about "freeloaders" that "want to be fed by the government". A good portion of right-wingers also believe that the govt pays a whole minimum wage to every person in jail, despite this bullshit being debunked several times already.

There's a substantial assumption that the wealthy know best how to manage wealth and the economy but it's all predicated on the notion that those wealthy people are willing to act in the interest of everyone, when in fact they tend to act on their own personal interest (I mean, if someone has a net worth of over a billion dollars and they're trying to accumulate even more money, that should give you a good idea how their policy will affect people who are making 40k/yr). They tend not to want to create jobs or increase wages more than they want to improve quality of earnings, because they stand to lose a lot and they somehow want more

Who is there to vote for otherwise? Two sides of the same coin. The rich try to keep politics about anything except wealth inequality. The rich keep the good candidates off your ballot long before it’s time to choose between tweedle Dee and tweedle dum.

I can use my brother as an example for that:

My younger brother is entirely sold on billionaire philanthropy. He watched interviews where people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos on talk shows and podcasts, places where people like this go to advertise themselves, and has been completely convinced that they're innovative, smart people.

Smart people who, through just being so damn smart, managed to become billionaires.

One's "own best interest" can take a lot of different forms. Especially when the number and variety of plausible candidates are finite. Your preferred candidate for a given office will rarely line up perfectly with your own values. There's a compromise there.

If I vote for my own finances, it may come at the cost of my morals. It I vote for my own moral interest, it may cost me more. If I vote for my own power, it may cost someone else their freedoms. How heavily do I weight my own interests against those of a wider society? Political identities and philosophies are complicated, and can't necessarily be reduced to a single binary choice that is "best" in every scenario.

They're idiots

The rich are clever and very well coordinated

Most are wanting an end to this current system so they’ll ‘play’ it out knowing albeit the struggle, Democracy has left the building and late stage capitalism is showing the disparity of the predators and preys of society

Because it's no longer about benefits or interests.

It's about the "my side won, your side lost, get over it" mentality. It's about the tribalism and making sure you keep your ire focused on your fellow man rather than looking up and seeing the source of your problems

And it's not just the US. It's fucking everywhere.

Probably unpopular answer, but it's not some clear cut "this political party has better policies for everyone". Republican policies usually are better for people living in rural areas, and Democratic policies are usually better for people in cities. I'm sure people will debate this, but this is the reason why people typically vote depending on where they live. At the very least, they believe that their party has better policies for them and their way of life.

My personal (anecdotal evidence) is that I work for a small business in a rural area, and our main customers are other small business owners (usually self employed or under 5 employees). Over the last 3 presidents, the Obama years were rough for our company, we had explosive growth during the Trump years, and then we've had stagnant growth over the past 4 years. Our largest competitor went out of business this past year, which sent us a lot of new customers, but we've also had a lot of our customers go out of business as well, so we've been pretty stagnant. Being stagnant isn't terrible, we don't have shareholders or anything, but the cost of living has increased and company profit/wages haven't which is a problem. That said I know we're doing pretty well compared to a lot of people here.

Another (once again anecdotal) example is that I have a friend who paints murals full time, for the past 30ish years. He told me that he does well with either Republicans or Democrats in office, but that his customers change. During republican presidents, his customer base is usually local businesses wanting to decorate their stores. During democratic presidents, his customer base is usually towns, state buildings, schools, etc.

But anyways, I'd be very interested to hear from some people living in cities if there's a visible uptick in income/etc when we have a democratic president, or in general what your personal observations are on how which president affects your local businesses/income/prices/etc.

They believe it will benefit them one day.