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I'm pretty sure a lot of it is "Hatred", but I'm not sure which direction the Hate Flows.
Most of my family comes from Mountain Stock. Up until about 2020, they've always been staunch conservatives who voted straight ticket Democrat 100% of the time. Since Biden took office, many of them have been direct targets of new regulatory stances that have completely fucked their livelihoods. I'll list a few below.
Since Biden got in office, there have been repeated attacks on the livelihoods of an entire class of blue collar people. I've watched entire branches of my extended family go from straight-ticket blue voters to people who are so furious about what Biden is doing that they will gladly vote for Trump just to see Biden lose in the most humiliating, soul-destroying, morale-breaking manner possible. They don't care that it might not be great for them either. They're rednecks; they're used to getting the shit-end of every trade. They're accustomed to being the target of America's hate for the last 30 years. All they know is that they think they can weather the disaster better than the Biden people can, and they'll gladly suffer that pain if it means they can watch their enemies hurt worse.
Can you give some context on that? What causes that type of voting profile?
At least in my circles, it all comes down to Unions.
Appalachia skews old - old enough that many blue collar workers were able to get Union jobs before both the Companies and the Unions closed off those means of employment. For people still working those jobs, most of their political information gets filtered by (and for) the Union. Since Unions skew Democrat, so do low information voters who are members.
After that, the next most common person is the person who is not union, but is steeped in Union culture from birth. They'll tend to vote like their parents and neighbors do, which is straight ticket democrat, if they vote at all.
There used to be an entire category of socially conservative Democrats who had this voting bloc locked down tighter than a duck's asshole. Today, though, Joe Manchin is really the only one left.
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For years I've read about the many abuses of "navigable waterways". Clearly meant to protect actual rivers or bodies of water so large that boats could cross them. But commonly applied to any dry ditch that sometimes becomes a little stream in heavy rain. This and other examples of bureaucracies stretching limited narrow text into extremely broad powers is why I don't like the Chevron deference.
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