Of course, voters endorsing politicians whose policies seem likely to hurt them is nothing new. Many Southern and midwestern states boast long histories of leaders who enact laws that disadvantage their own constituents and constituents who nonetheless repeatedly vote for these same politicians. As I show in the following chapters, that dynamic took on particular urgency in the decades leading up to the Trump presidency, when an emerging American conservatism promised to make white America “great” in ways that directly harmed lower- and middle-income white voters who supported conservative
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