How to understand modern American voting habits:
1. While people are logical, for most people the decision-making process is inherently intuitive. However, few people will ever admit to making decisions based on something besides logic.
2. In their intuitive decision-making process, people are motivated both by virtue and vice. However, few people will ever admit to making decisions based on their vices.
3. Thus, people are constantly looking for logical rationales for decisions which are intuitive and based on mixed or bad motives.
4. The art of modern American politics, then, is to provide voters with logical rationales for what they have already intuitively decided; to give them permission to act upon what society tells them is a vice.
Thus, politicians lean into the economic message, even though studies suggest that people often vote against their economic self-interests. And thus, politicians constantly employ racist dog whistles, while denying that they are racists.
Try as you might, it is impossible to find a logical reason why people would prefer Trump over Biden or the GOP over Democrats. There are plenty of intuitive reasons--most not good--for such a preference, however.
In this regard, good salesmen--and conmen, for that matter--know how to speak to the heart, and not the head. This is the one thing that Trump knows how to do.
Successful cons, by the way, nearly always work because the conman appeals to people's vices or failings. Greed combined with an inflated view of one's intellect compared to the conman makes many people easy prey, but people's worry and fear can also be used to trap them.
The issue is that these vices and failings are common to almost everyone. It's just that some people refuse to allow their vices or failings to lead them into a trap. A truly innocent person with pure motives is almost impossible to successfully con.
Political hucksters can also turn to the old standbys of ambition, resentment, spite, hatred, and racism to reel people in.