I didn’t realize you were talking about Republicans at first because of how bad they’ve gotten. I don’t even question it anymore with how normalized their evil policies have gotten.
I think they were a lot better at covering this up until 2010 when the Tea Party took hold. Since then they’ve been more and more blatant about it, culminating in totally taking off the mask in 2016. It seems to me that beforehand, the party elite carefully curated both their image and policies to have plausible deniability. With them losing control to the inmates however, the party hasn’t just thrown away their cover, they’ve decided to go for even worse policies.
It’s like they realized their followers are a cult, and they’re curious to see if anything they do goes too far to them. It’s such a pathetic state of affairs.
I think most republican voters simply care more about “other people can’t get a free thing that I had to pay for” or “I don’t want universal healthcare because I’m healthy and I don’t need it”. Which are both incredibly selfish mindsets. The GOP knows about these mindsets and does everything they can to encourage them.
I think they now are so far gone that they find it easier to convince voters by spreading propaganda than it is to win people with good policies. I think part of it is that on the policy front, there’s stiff competition. But on the identity politics front, it’s not even a competition. The GOP is massively better at propaganda and identity politics. They know they’re better at it, which is why they’ve leaned so heavily into it while also having so little else to offer. Fixing problems often gets in the way of profit, so they don’t have an incentive to actually fix many problems (at least not for normal people).
