US politics goes from totally incomprehensible to totally comprehensible if you just accept that ordinary people mostly base their views on what they're hearing from others, especially prominent politicians and media figures.
If you mentally invert the perceived arrow of causation, make it so that ideas are mostly flowing DOWN from institutions into the population, instead of UP from the population into institutions, a lot of mysterious electoral and political shifts become much less mysterious.
For whatever reason US commentators simply refuse to give up the idea that the prime mover in politics is some kind of sub rosa public opinion, which drives institutions but is never formed by them, and suspiciously, seems almost supernaturally resistant to clear measurement.
What I'd propose is that this all-powerful, fundamentally important, measurement-resistant force DOESN'T REALLY EXIST, and public opinion largely consists of what people are hearing, especially from trusted source. When what they're hearing changes, so does public opinion.
E.g., whatever the historical antecedents of Trumpism in the GOP, his takeover was a clear sea change for the party that nominated McCain and Romney, and the change was clearly led by elite validators like Fox News telling Republicans that Trump was their new king.
It's almost dismayingly simple: politics is driven by what people believe, and what people believe is a product of what people hear. And that puts voters on a media leash, for the most part - although the exact nature of the relevant media can vary a lot, depending on the voter.
When you see rapid, seemingly contradictory changes in public opinion - well, they're coming from somewhere, and the basic social structure changes slowly, on the time frame of years or decades, but media narratives shift fast, on a daily or even hourly basis. That's a clue!
Using public opinion to explain US politics is like using crowd reactions to explain why a team won a football game. You can't do it and you'll go crazy trying. There's clearly SOME KIND of relationship but because you screwed up the arrow of causation you'll never figure it out.
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