I don't really have a point in conveying this information, it's just something I find very interesting, I did not immediately understand this when I was young, and I'm sure it has practical applications to politics/activism for someone:
People don't vote their beliefs, they vote their deal-breaker issues.
My first encounter with this was in high school. I went to school in a rural, largely conservative area (though there were plenty of left-leaning young people). Conservatives in Washington are known for their complete disregard for the environment, but at my high school, the environmental club was more than half conservative, and their president was very economically conservative; he later went on to work for the RNC but quit during Trump's presidency because he could not, in good conscience, be involved with the party anymore, though he is still conservative.
One day I asked one of my conservative friends about this discrepancy: Why are conservatives known for their disregard for the environment, while our local conservatives live by "leave no trace," pick up litter while hunting, volunteer with environmental groups to clean up streams, and even the farmers are passionate about planting buffers around their fields to be sure fertilizer runoff doesn't get into the water? He told me that your average conservative person respects and wants to preserve the land, given that many of them hunt and enjoy outdoor activities, but the conservatives in Washington don't do those kinds of things and put a higher priority on the money there is in industries like fossil fuels. However, they still get the conservative vote because while our local conservatives appreciate the environment, it isn't one of their deal-breaker issues for national politics - that tends to be stuff like abortion and border policy.
Similarly, I recently made a friend who is Hispanic, gay, and was raised Catholic. He works in Washington, and one day he told me that a lot of Hispanic people vote conservative and even voted for Trump. I was immediately like HUH??? They voted for the guy who puts Hispanic immigrants in cages, who constantly disrespects their basic humanity??? And he said, "Yep, a lot of them are Catholic, and they are single-issue voters on abortion."
So like I said, I'm not completely sure how to use that information yet, given that I do not work in Washington where that all seems more relevant, but this has illustrated to me that at least on the local level, you might find surprising areas of allyship and support on certain issues that a given group is stereotyped not to care about because of the way they vote, when in fact, those issues just aren't their deal-breaker issues in federal elections.
