Ashley Lopez

It's also tribalism.

Right.

If you're a Republican, this is your identity.

Right.

Like disagreeing with Trump means that you are not a real Republican.

And that has been that way for a long time.

And there's also something psychologically happening that I have observed in some Trump voters, which is like.

You have to basically defend him because you're defending yourself a lot, a lot of the time.

And that is just really hard to sort of break out of.

I've watched this in focus groups like voters say, look, I have people in my family who don't like Trump.

And every single time something happens that they don't like that Trump did, I'm not just defending him.

I have to defend myself and my vote.

And that is just like a really hard habit to break.

Yeah.

I mean, this is probably the thing that came up the most, which is even when voters are talking about things like ICE and some of the foreign policy stuff involving Greenland and Venezuela, like there's two things going on here, which is one, they think Trump is really distracted.

A lot of independent voters and swing voters say they voted for Trump because of the economy.

And they wanted to see lower prices and they're not seeing that like their material reality has not changed enough since Trump has been in office.

And two, they actually think that all the chaos being created by situations like what's happening in Minnesota and Venezuela are making them more anxious about the economy.

I mean, you wouldn't think like the two things would be connected.

But I heard a voter say, like, look, I just don't know what's going to happen the next day.