The middle of the country and its 50-60 million potential voters was written off by the DNC 20-something years ago to chase money and bigger states. This left a void in the so-called "Flyover Country" that is now a Republican monolith.

Median income may be 72K a year, but not out here it isn't. Know who the people I know are who voted Trump? 30K a year, drowning in debt, watching jobs go elsewhere, watching their kids move away and with them the energy to keep shit running. Health care is eating any income gains, nobody is moving into the area to generate increasing home prices so everyone in the rural Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio etc are losing money by owning a home.

Some of these areas are fucked. The people living there know it too. And here comes a blow hard who promises to "Make America Great Again" like their mom and dad used to talk about, when there was money for paving the streets, when the farms all made buckets of cash, when the nostalgia goggles make everything look wonderful. The Dem's don't give a shit about poor rural white people. If that is true or not I cannot say, but leave the bigger cities and people will tell you that the only people who show up when it comes time to vote are the Republicans.

So they vote for people that take away the benefits of living in a wealthy country. They defund the schools, cut the repair budgets, funnel tax dollars to the "Job creators" who just get wealthier while the rest of us eat shit.

The answer to your question is about 7000 words long, needs links and tons of data, and I'm fucking pissed off at the DNC and my fellow liberals that I may just sit down and pound it out this weekend.