Why do Americans vote against their own interests?
Because the leading politicos are smarter than they are. Of course, the leading politicians have help, in the form of professional staff, think tanks, hired campaign managers, etc.
The trick, it seems, is to identify 'wedge issues' that people care about and to magnify these into end-all, be-all issues that seem to be worth more than more basic bread-and-butter issues.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who writes an opinion column in the NYT, shows how in today's column, below: