Explain Like I'm Five

In some cases, they ran in districts that were already heavily Republican, often due to gerrymandering. They won because any Republican would have won.

If other Republicans ran in the primaries, they won the primary by exciting the primary voting base. Far fewer people vote in primaries, and they tend to be engaged in hype, and MAGA is all hype based propaganda based on fear and anger. That excites Republican primary voters.

The few that defeated incumbent Republicans did so through the hate and fear angle, because it works. It is a successful fascist playbook, as shown throughout history.

So basically they mostly won for the same reason Trump won in 2016, fascist propaganda stoking fear. They promised to solve all the problems they made up about the groups they blamed.

The whole Ohio immigrants eating pets is just the same thing, dialed up to 11.

Much of USA treats their leaders team with the same reverence and loyalty they treat sports teams even if they are consistently ~~shitty~~ poopy.

The root cause is economic. Wealth is being transferred to the billionaires at a growing rate. This causes difficulty for most people. If we were smart we would unify and tax obscene wealth, and everybody would be happy. But instead, those billionaires spend hundreds of millions of dollars stoking the flames of a culture war. They amplify every emotional issue to motivate emotional (outrage/anger/fear) voting. Now instead of liberals pushing progressive tax policy, they just vote for moderate democrats because the only other choice is a fascist. And if it wasn’t that, they’d stoke liberals into a Green Party socialism craziness and vilify it, so that again the sensible choice is moderates.

The real question you should ask is why are most representatives on both sides millionaires? There’s really only a handful of congress members who don’t already have millions in assets. I’ll answer it for you - it’s almost impossible to get elected without a major campaign donation. Rich people fear poor people rising up, so they throw money at measly millionaires to do their bidding and keep their power.

In summary: the rich control 90% of who gets elected on both sides. The rich get whatever they want, because everybody else thinks they need to vote based on a couple issues they saw on TV. The actual candidate doesn’t matter. They’re all billionare’s puppets, who vote on party lines in order to get re-elected. Stir the pot and lose your position.

This is the best explanation of MAGA I've ever seen, still true after 8-years. Read it. It's important.

https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about

Systematic capture. They planned it.

They believe they are living in a godless country. Liberals are out to destroy America with their evil atheist ways. They believe liberals are destroying traditional family values. They believe liberals want open borders so all the immigrants will vote for them. They believe those immigrants are all gang members just waiting to kill God fearing Christians. They believe this is a Christian country. They believe abortion is murder. Finally, they believe Trump is the only one who can save the country.

Some ran unopposed.

The MAGA movement of 2016 billed itself as an anti establishment movement. Contrasting itself from traditional Republicans and the Democratic party. It promised to "Drain the Swamp".

Their success is indictive of a discontent with the state of the government at the time. They targeted the blue collar demographic promising stances on issues that'd help them.

Here's a video on a county that voted Democrat from 1869-2016: https://youtu.be/yfxvHqTCy2w

Keep in mind you came to a left leaning platform with essentially no Trump supporters and asked why do people like Trump. Listen to what they cite not just us.

The way politics works now is that MAGA tries to reenact the Handmaid's Tale and/or sell the world to disaster capitalists while doing nothing to actually govern, Democrats try to play it cool and actually govern sometimes, and dark money gets poured into elections to make everything even murkier.

The real, possibly main answer is largely because many people, especially young people, do not vote in large enough numbers to stop them.

There's also stuff like gerrymandering that help parties in power stay in power when they get to draw the district lines but I would argue that poor turnout is what makes the biggest difference.

Citizens United. In 2001, corporations were suddenly allowed to donate an unlimited amount of money to political campaigns. Campaign donations were deemed a form of expression protected by the first ammendment. The entrenched far-right republicans were suddenly being outspent by even further right people from out of nowhere, unseating many of them. The game for both parties then became how much corporate donation can you attract, and for Republicans, they found the further right you go the more votes you get. So republican nominees could have standards or keep their job, not both. The ones that were the far-right were still professional legislators, genuinely believing conservativism is in society's best interest, and many of them tried to resist, like McCain and Romney. The new far-right ones are professional shills in it for personal gain. The old ones who stuck around are greedy cowards who know better. The Republicans have slid right at lightspeed ever since Citizens United.

Republicans got in bed with the Tea Party, pretended their opinions were legitimate, then found themselves being successfully primaried by the monster they legitimized.

"Hey so did you actually meet my demands as a constituent?"

"Lol no"

Doesn't vote Democrat next election

Cleetus: "Finally the racist shitbag I've been voting every cycle for has been elected"

"This is all your fault as a voter that you didn't blindly vote for us after we refused to meet your demands. Now enjoy 2-4 years of racist shitbag so that you'll be guilted into voting for us again next cycle and instead of meeting your original demands, we'll just spend our time partially undoing all the stuff racist shitbag has implemented"

Repeat x99999999999

Conservatives typically win by promising what they will not do vs. what they will do. (At least the true conservatives do. Not all Republicans are conservative though)

Hurt people. And yeah a lot of

They promised to hurt the right people. The kind of people who will vote for them don't follow up on voting records, they just watch pundits or read web news that reaffirms their point of view and feelings.

The reality is a small percent of the voting public actually vote in primaries and those who do, on the right especially, tend to be the most extreme variety.

Populism is fairly simple, you just parrot the following talking points:

The system isn’t working. I am fighting the system. Elect me and I’ll take the fight to them.

What isn’t working should be as vague as possible, so the voter believes it is the thing they’re angry about. When elected, the candidate should continue to complain about the system and crow about how hard they’re fighting for you, so you keep voting for them.

Unfortunately, this eventually leads to you actually passing legislation that makes everything much, much worse than it was. You can keep blaming the other side, but eventually, the jig is up.

They promise to punish the people republican voters don't like (poor people, minorities, and "elites"). And then they fulfill the first two.

The same way all regime whores get into the office... Donor money and captured political process.

While plebs fighting culture wars, the parasite class is executing a class war!

They promised to be "not biden", and lemmings ate the fish like dynamite.

See, that phrase didn't make sense, but it doesn't need to. Politics for these people isn't about policy, or logic, or even country. It's about "if I win, you lose, so fuck you!".

And that's how we got here.

Right: Things are shit because of the people who are already marginalized (letting us take advantage of pre-existing prejudice and targeting the people with the smallest platforms to push back against our narratives)

Left: Things are shit because the people at the top are fucking over all of us together

Center: Things aren't shit

In the absence of a leftist narrative, the most fundamental Center vs Right disagreement is just whether or not things are shit. As things get shittier and shittier, the Center will keep losing strength to the Right.

That type of candidate my or may not have any coherent platform. Even more than for a normal politician, it's about pandering to people's identity. They also have the advantage that they can lie about what they've done, and then just cover those lies with more lies and misdirections if called out.

In normal times people aren't totally fooled by that, but it has been working very well in the US (and to a degree Canada), lately.