GOP's good at brainwashing stupid and / or dysfunctional people. It's also good at attracting one issue voters who only care about guns, abortion, immigration, low taxes, etc.

Many people (if not most) are not that smart or caring. If you give them the one thing they want, they'll support you. Many people (if not most) are also bigots, and hate one group or another and you won't get them to change their minds by any means.

Republicans know this (they have psychological and media experts on their team who are smart, unlike their voting base) and use their knowledge to manipulate people with lies, and it works, just due to how human nature is.

Democrats also know this, which is why they don't seriously fight Republicans by compromising on some of their principles or also pandering just enough to get elected in purple / weak red areas. It's honestly just a power sharing agreement to keep things split 50 / 50 so the corpo donors can get what they want done while the average person gets distracted by the very public binary fight these 2 "parties" are always engaging in.

The only real answer is ranked choice voting and the formation of 2 additional parties. One that's fiscally and environmentally liberal and socially conservative, and another that's socially liberal, but fiscally liberal, and hopefully environmentally at least moderate.

People forget that most places on the internet are left-leaning or flat out liberal bubbles. Especially FOSS communities like Lemmy / Kbin. If you go out and engage people in real life, it's easy to quickly realize that people will keep voting in climate denying, polluting jackasses so they can keep their guns, or make sure abortion's illegal, etc.

Our best hope is young GOP voters who believe in climate change and want to do something about it, because they're growing up in this world, and will have to live in it too. Hopefully that Hawaii fire made even the rich realize that shit like that could happen to them during their vacation, and it'll make them give a shit. Anyhow, our best bet is to try to make deals with the next generation of Republicans, and also introduce ranked choice voting which can create parties and coalitions built around compromise and getting things done as opposed to ideological purity tests, which keep losing us the house and / or senate, even if we win the presidency.