most people I know vote on the issues
Here's how people actually vote:
1) Your either left or right politically
2) You adopt the positions of your party or political leanings the majority of the time without much thought
3) You then seek out information from your preffered biased sources to justify a position on an issue you know nothing about
4) But you never actually give a shìt if the issue is achieved and never check up on it again (notice Trumps base doesn't care he failed to build the wall)
^^ Pretty much. This is the not-so-secret secret of the American electorate, and it's something a lot of people not only disagree with but sometimes find objectionable. They can't handle that elections are driven by legions of dumb people and partisan zombies who will do whatever it takes to rationalize their pre-determined choices.
I think there are exceptions - anything involving people will have many exceptions, but this explains most of the behavior.
This is a decent article that touches on the issue somewhat:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/opinion/trump-republicans.html
Unfortunately it really is that simple for many, many people.
No offense to OSR, but I'm going to take the studies, polls and general behavior of elections on a macroscopic view to his anecdotal evidence - evidence that he could just as easily have misinterpreted (who is to say these people wouldn't have rationalized their choices a differently in another context?). I think it's fair to say that OSR fits into the category of people who may take umbrage with the idea that people on a mass scale really don't make good, objective and sound decisions.
Even though Trump's base is dumb as hell and most voters are clueless....there is one positive though about the American political system:
American politics is led by the intransigent minority. A small level, about 1% - 3% of the total population, which basically forces the entire population to have to submit to their political preferences.
The majority of Americans voters just blindly vote for the same party every election but they don't actually care that much about what gets legislated. Policy and legislation is actually dictated by the small intransigent minority that is very politically and civically active. This is why Evangelicals can keep dictating abortion policies despite the fact the majority of the country doesn't agree with them (they are exceptionally civically active with a cult like dedication). Most of the important legislation in American history has come from Civic groups that were extremely active but never made up more than 3% of the total voting population. (Labor unions, Suffargette movement, Civil Rights movement,etc....)
This is why candidate quality matters so much in American elections. Majority don't care about the policies but that small civically engaged group that make up your grassroots do.
this is also why turnout is key; campaigns are not going to be able to flip many voters from the other party (Obama-Trump voters in the rust belt were looking for a reason to vote GOP), so you simply need to increase your turnout through rhetoric/inflammatory statements
