I like Grapes of Wrath, but I don't think that's a solid understanding of the current situation . I think that almost all of my friends who voted for Trump did

I like Grapes of Wrath, but I don't think that's a solid understanding of the current situation . I think that almost all of my friends who voted for Trump did so precisely because they think the US is exploitative in a variety of ways. They are often quite subject to that exploitation and aware of many of its specifics. From my position, which is anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian (or left libertarian, or anarchist or whatever label you'd use), they have very misguided understandings of the specifics of that exploitation. However, also from my position my many friends who voted for Harris also have similar shortcomings in their understandings of the world. My understanding is that 15M or so folks decided that Harris was not a candidate who wold make their lives better. The fact that the Democrats absolutely did not fix this system begs the question of why it did not get fixed. My understanding is that they did not want to fix the system, or that there are structural issues in the system which make it functionally impossible to reform. I believe that it could be reformed, but that since the donating classes to the parties did not want it the ACA became a massive handout to the insurance industry instead of some more universally solved solution. Thus your position that folks aren't voting for "candidates that will help make their life better" could be read in a couple of ways and I find it a bit ambiguous as stated. Like, I typically read stuff like that as saying "if they'd voted for KH, then this could at least maybe get fixed". But that feels internally contradictory given that when people did vote for a similar hope-and-change candidate it did not make things markedly better. At the same time, I think that folks stopped voting largely not out of apathay but out of a real awareness that they aren't selecting from "candidates that will help make their life better". So my position is that folks actually are voting for Trump for the same reasons they were previously voting for folks like Obama and not, for instance, for the Steinbeck-ian rational that led them to vote for Reagan or the Bush family.