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[snot]

32. Two points:

First of all, I think most people vote their pocketbooks. Americans have been struggling – for too long, and with steadily increasing difficulty and stress – to afford not just the American Dream but food, housing, and health care; and at least some of that difficulty appears due to the actions of Dem leaders (the repeal of Glass-Steagall, NAFTA, the refusal to adequately regulate credit derivatives, the refusal to prosecute bankers after 2008, expensive foreign wars that drain our resources without obviously helping anyone other than the MIC {Republicans have been as bad or worse on many of these, but the Dems used to be the ones that we looked to to help us}.) The expense of the war in Ukraine is a related concern here, one that Trump promised to fix.

Secondly, I disagree that "wokeness" per se was that big of a factor. I live in one of the most conservative states, and I literally know no middle class person, Dem or Republican, for whom economics weren't the main concern.

I think "wokeness" was more of a make-weight. (That said, I wish we'd consider resolving the controversies re- competitive sports by simply classifying athletes based on non-gender -related characteristics – i.e., why not rely instead on height, weight, or even hormone levels – whatever physical characteristics are directly related to performance in the particular sport – rather than fixating on what bits of flesh they've got in their crotches, gender preferences, or other criteria that are relatively irrelevant to athletic performance?)