Psychology. Has there ever been a field whose methods and measures were more subject to change? And yet when we stumble across a psychological yardstick by which to measure certain behaviors, we are relieved to finally put a name to what we see.

That’s become especially true in the era of the Trump voter. Without some sort of psychological examination of their circumstances and thought processes, it’s impossible to understand how they can support someone like him — let alone with the undying loyalty that they do.

It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect — well, part of it, anyway — and it makes people believe that they are smarter than they actually are. The other part is something we call motivated reasoning, but that part can’t really be helped. We all do that to a certain extent.

But basically, the more you tell a Trump voter that the thing they believe is incorrect, the more you prove with facts and figures that they are wrong, the stronger they cling to that belief.

So seeing the new YouGov poll that came out this week, it doesn’t actually come as a surprise that we’re seeing it again. This time, pollsters asked how many Republicans believed Donald Trump would be “reinstated” as President, and the number has actually gone up since the last time they polled on that question.

Even after Trump voters watched the predicted dates of Trump’s reinstatement come and go, even after the MyPillow guy and the kooky lawyer were proven as wrong as humanly possible, they still believed that the former president was somehow going to retake the Oval Office from Joe Biden.

And now the number of them who believe that nonsense has actually gone up by nearly a third. And it was a specific question, too: Not just that he’d be reinstated, but that it would happen by the end of this year.

He’d better get to work. There aren’t many days left in 2021.

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