Read on Twitter
If you were an Obama voter, take a sec to reflect on how your opinion about him evolved from 2008 to 2016. Not how it went from a binary 1 to a 0, just how it matured and evolved. Why is it so hard to believe that the same thing isn't happening for a segment of 2016 Trump voters?
Two things can be true. Trumpist media has created a cult-like atmosphere around him in which he can do no wrong and where people are insulated from countervailing information. And also, each individual person has their own distinctive relationship to Trump that can shift.
It's a foundational maxim for historians that people are complicated and unpredictable. History is comprised of large forces and can be written about in generalizations, but those generalizations frequently crumble when you drill down to look at individuals.
62 million individuals pulled the lever for Trump in 2016. He's not even tried to recruit more people into his camp. Meanwhile, Fox News reaches 3.5 million viewers per day, barely 5% of that 62 million number. https://www.foxnews.com/media/highest-viewership-network-history-msnbc-cnn-2020
So if someone extrapolates from "this is what's on Fox News" to "this is what's going on in the head of every Trump 2016 voter" they're just going to miss a lot of the complexity on the ground.
The overwhelming majority of voters aren't on Twitter & don't pay much attention to politics. The things that influence their decision making are incredibly hard to discern or predict. Maybe seeing a bunch of people they know mocking Trump's bleach comment will matter. Maybe not.
