As a Midwesterner, I've found many unexpected Trump voters who had similar motivations. A lot of: "well, Hillary isn't going to change anything and things need to change". Not a lot of deep consideration as to what this 'change' will mean (beyond potential reinvestment in infrastructure and "jobs").

I actually think this may be quite a problem for President Trump down the line. These are friendly, community minded people who - generally speaking - overlooked (rather than covertly support, as everyone seems to project) Trump's more outlandish/discriminatory rhetoric. If he comes up short on the community reinvestment and gets mired in a bunch of unseemly scandals, the support of these people will drop off.

I'm actually worried it won't be a problem. For those Americans who don't obsess over policy, all Trump needs to do is make them happy in the week of, or month of the re-election and he'll have a decent chance. Combine this with the voters in each side who "robo vote" for their party (mostly to prevent the other party from winning) and it will again be a close race. Lastly, many of the policy changes can't be easily measured (or take much longer for the effects to be felt) which allows the party in power to convince voters to stick with them to allow time for the new policies to take effect.

Maybe - but I'm skeptical that he will largely be able to follow through with his promises. Many of the big issues we face aren't problems created by/solved by political leaders. For instance, we're not going to quickly turn around job loses in the US because we're fundamentally seeing a shift in the importance/balance of labor to capital. Low-skill manufacturing jobs are never coming back - and there isn't a ready pool of alternative ideas that previous presidents were just refusing to implement (or some nonsense). If a president could solve that problem it would already be done.

That said, what people think is true is - of course - whatever they can be convinced is true. Immigration really isn't/hasn't been a problem, so if the president can build an unnecessary wall and convince people that immigration isn't a problem anymore because of it then maybe we're boned.

Recall seeing statics (polls) that showed about the same amount of Hillary and Trump voters decided on policy issues. The most popular reason to vote in both camps was to make sure than the other candidate did not win.

Its was very symmetric.

for better or worse, we'll never know what negative/unpopular/bad things a President Clinton would have done

an election is a choice between 2 alternates though

didn't like X (maybe 'thought X would do bad things' is a better way to translate that), is a valid reason to vote for Y, and doesn't translate very well to "just to fuck with everyone"

---------

if you dislike Trump, the Democratic Party's failure to give the American people a better alternative to Trump than Clinton, deserves some portion of the blame

(and while we're on it, the medias failure to hold the democratic party accountable to produce better options than Trump deserve a good deal of the blame as well)

-----------

These things work in balance, Trump gets away with a lot of the stuff he gets away with, because people don't trust the alternatives,

people don't trust the alternatives, because those alternatives have proven themselves unworthy of trust