People are generally speaking less stupid than most give them credit for.
Look at Trump’s recent rally. Or how restaurant and bar attendance stayed 80%+ below average when Georgia and the Carolinas reopened them. You have a small percentage of strident true believers. Other than that there’s enough bullshit floating around that plenty of people may not believe masks are worth it, and 125k deaths is hard to contextualize when you aren’t seeing it first hand. But most people aren’t about to start licking subway poles during rush hour.
The whole poor rubes in fly over country thing is very much a judgy myth. For one thing the mean income of GOP voters is way higher than the national numbers, and more than double that of DNC voters. College educated voters have long been a GOP block, driven by a huge (and over represented) proportion of college educated white men.
For another no one has been fooled into believing Trump is something he’s not. For the most part people even seem to know when he’s lying and they think it’s great. They believe in this shit. It’s not misinformed people voting against their own interest. The core are people who genuinely believe this shit is good, even when it harms them too.
This whole thing is just not being driven by white working class voters in tiny rural counties. The whole the economy is more important than lives, don’t let the virus win, open it up push came out of the financial class. As stock market falls triggered panic.
A big part of why NY got hit so bad was it took Cuomo too long to issue a stay at home order, and he avoiding mask requirements as long as it could be justified. Public health officials had recommended quarantine measures for several weeks before it happened. And even as the order came down Bill Di Blasio was pushing back against it.
Estimates have shown if they had shut down just 2 weeks earlier the epidemic in NY might have been cut in half.
