People don't vote their self-interest.
People don't vote their self-interest. Nor do people vote rationally to promote their principles or advance their values. Instead, people vote for the candidate with whom they symbolically-emotionally identify. Both self-interest and principles or values enter into the choice of candidate primarily when these things serve as symbols for the expressive-emotional needs of the voter. Symbolic-emotional election of leaders is true not only for individual voters, but --even more so-- for the collectivities those individual voters comprise. After all, the result of an election is a collective product; the winner --and thus the winning majority-- represents the entire collectivity. To the extent that it is true that collective actions express the needs of the collectivity-as-a-whole, even the "losing" voters are authentically part of the "we-who-did-that." Donald Trump represents us all. Truly. We need to own it. "Us and them" masks the group reality. P