What exactly do rightoids want?

Assuming you're talking about the voters, most American voters are low-information. Its worth noting that if "didn't vote" was a candidate, it would win every national election. The idea that the average committed RW voter has overarching principles or policy goals that inform their voting choices is, I think, giving them too much credit, as evidenced by the Republicans' almost complete, almost overnight switch from decades of neoconservatism to Trumpism. And the question of what motivates the RW base is different than the question of what wins elections for RW candidates, since those few elections that are actually real contests are usually decided by independent/swing voters.

In terms of motivating the RW base, the coalitions in the modern GOP exist due to material facts of history, not because they all logically cohere. There's no logical reason an anti-abortion voter would naturally be anti-gun control, those are just factions competing for influence in the same party for historical reasons. Trying to find a philosophical thru-line seems, to me, like a futile endeavor. In terms of motivating independents/swing voters to vote RW, a lot of it is just finding wedge issues and trying to induce a feeling of being under siege in portions of the electorate. "They wanna take your guns!" "They wanna groom your kids!" "They're gonna keep the school closed another 6 months for covid!" Dems do the same thing.

If you want to predict election outcomes, you can do it more accurately by looking at 1) what party controls the WH, 2) the economy, and 3) gas prices, than you can by looking at any individual policy issue. In terms of electoral game theory, its actually in both parties' interests to be as similar as possible to make elections closer to a coinflip.

/r/stupidpol Thread