Many of them started in camp 1 and entered camp 2.
my (lifelong republican) aunt and uncle were trump haters in the 2016 primaries. but of course they voted for him in the election because Hillary is literally the devil, and once he won they were all in.
I need to ask my parents, cuz last I heard around June my dad had snapped out enough to at least to say he was considering not voting for the first time ever in a national election. There’s an ironic push for ranked choice style options moving forward now thanks to our state Republicans trying to revert back to caucuses and pissing a bunch of constituents off by having us vote to ban other options
A lot of conservatives are authoritarians that value group cohesion above most everything else. Going against the group feels bad in a deep way, I think, so all sorts of justifications will be made to stay with the group.
Honestly, as far as I’m concerned that’s a form of stupid. Kind of funny given the boomer cliche of “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?”. It turns out yes, a lot of people would.