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I see Hank Hill is trending and it's all people outraged at the suggestion that he would have voted for Trump, and I may be forced to write a blog post about how wrong you all are.
In short: HH temperamentally conservative and fundamentally decent, and a mostly apolitical Republican for cultural/demographic reasons. He's also a white man without a college degree but with a stable middle class job in a medium-sized town in Texas.
That demographic profile swung *hard* for Trump, and were already mostly there. *Of course* Hill voted for Trump. The question is whether he was a reluctant voter who finally came around or not.
Many people spend much of 2016 expecting and hoping that Trump would lose precisely because reasonable, decent people who happened to be Republicans, like Trump, wouldn't go for it. A few didn't, but the weren't Hill's demographic at all.
Yes, of course he doesn't seem like the kind of deranged monster who'd vote for an odious creepy joke like Trump. Of course fans of the show have a hard time seeing him voting for Trump. That was our national tragedy.
Others have pointed to his respect/admiration for Ann Richards as evidence he wouldn't support Trump. This fails to recognize the recency of strong negative polarization. Richards' electoral victory was 30 years ago. She won Reagan voters (like Hill) at rates inconceivable today.
In short: if you think your assessment of individual character is a better indicator of whether someone would Trump than demographics+strong negative partisanship, you don't understand how Trump got elected.
