alt Hacker News> voters didn't want this
Yes they did. Of course they didn't want to be targeted themselves, but the rhetoric was very explicit about what would happen, and they already had a preview of it in 2016 and voted even more favorably for this regime this time around.
> The media silently accepted Trump's lie at face value when he said he knew nothing about Project 2025
Not true. The media was very vocal about it, and it was obvious that he was on board with it.
> Most Republican voters, when told about the actual policies being implemented by elected Republicans, don't believe the reports, and assume that nobody would be enacting such stupid policy.
This isn't true. The recent ouster of Thomas Massie is a clear example of this. However, even if that were true, Republican voters still overwhelmingly prefer this to the alternative (Democrats), and polls show this today.
> Yet the voters keep voting for them.
Indeed. Not sure how you can acknowledge this but somehow believe it's not what the voters want.
Replies
First, you're making a big logical error by replacing "voters" with "Republican voters" or the even more narrow, extreme, and unrepresentative group of "Republican primary voters".
If people knew they were voting for Project 2025, why would Trump disavow any connection to it during the campaign? It doesn't make any sense.
> Republican voters still overwhelmingly prefer this to the alternative (Democrats), and polls show this today.
Republican voters care less about policy than about the team. Take key Democratic policies, and present them in polls without the Democratic label, and Republicans support them. Add in the label and they don't support them.
It's not hard to understand that politics is mostly treated as sports-team affiliation these days.
Republicans don't vote for Republicans because of policies, they vote for Republicans because they identify as Republicans.
And, claiming that the Massie vote, of just the extreme primary voters, represents the public's will? That's ridiculous. Massie still got something like 45% of the vote, among that extreme and unrepresentative bloc of voters, after Trump going hard after Massie for trying to release the Epstein files.
The Massie vote is about extremist Republican's subservience to Trump, not about whether anybody actually likes policies. People despise Trump's Epstein coverup.
> The recent ouster of Thomas Massie is a clear example of this
How?