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Notes -
Why is it that a person can prefer someone who disagrees with them politically on more items than someone who disagrees on fewer items that are a strict subset of the other person's disagreements, so that it cannot be explained by priority of items?
Let me give a toy diagram to clarify. Suppose we have six areas where the people in question can disagree: ABCDEF. Now, if Alice cares mostly about A, I can see her preferring Bob, who agrees with her on A, but disagrees on B-F, over Carol, who agrees on B-F but disagrees on A. But what I'm talking about is when Bob disagrees with Alice on all of A-F, while Carol agrees with Alice on ABC and disagrees on DEF. Carol's disagreements with Alice are a strict subset of Bob's disagreements with Alice, so there's no way of prioritizing items that should make Alice prefer Bob over Carol…
…and yet, I've found people who express exactly this sort of preference. What is this?
You're assuming people can only disagree in six areas.
It may well be that the underlying value-set that shows A-C (but not D-F) also expresses !G, whereas the underlying value-set that shows A (but not B-F) also expresses G - and the person in question values G highly.
This goes doubly so when G vs !G is something that is unlikely to be publicly visible for one reason or another.
(This assumes there is only one such value-set. In actuality it's more like "is heavily correlated with".)
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