But Clinton’s use of “everyday Americans” proved to be short-­lived, perhaps because of its undeniably leaden ring. (Has anyone but Sly Stone ever self-identified as “everyday”?) By September, Clinton had dropped the phrase entirely. Campaign officials conceded to The Times that it was confusing and, maybe, a bit too close to Walmart’s “Everyday Low Prices.”

The whole episode revealed a fundamental tension underlying this year’s anomalous presidential contest. America’s self-­image as a middle-­class nation is so deeply ingrained in the country’s politics that we don’t often stop to think what, precisely, that means: whether it defines a concrete socioeconomic identity — a country where most people are neither very rich nor very poor — or an aspiration, the notion that if you “work hard and play by the rules,” as Clinton put it the first time she ran for president, you’re entitled to at least a modest prosperity. “Everyday Americans” was an attempt to acknowledge that the gap between these two ideas has widened to the point that ignoring it seems out of touch. Yet in its reversal, the campaign inadvertently revealed just how ill ­equipped American politics is for a post-­middle-­class nation — how deeply the way the country speaks of itself is tied up with these aspirations, even as more and more of its citizens come to see them as out of reach.

During Donald Trump’s ascent in the polls last fall, the most confounding question in politics was who, exactly, his supporters were. A couple of weeks before the New Hampshire primary in February, Byron York, a journalist well sourced among Republican operatives, crisscrossed the state asking party grandees: “Do you know anyone who supports Donald Trump?” “In more cases than not,” he wrote in The Washington Examiner, “actually, in nearly all the cases, the answer was no.”

As the first election results and exit polls came in, Trump’s voters seemed to be mostly high-­school-­educated white men, mostly making less than $50,000 a year. Perhaps more surprising, this description also fits, with some tailoring, the voters who have propelled the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. In mostly white New Hampshire, Sanders beat Clinton among voters making less than $50,000 a year by a staggering 33 percentage points — twice as big as his margin with voters who made more than that — and by 36 percentage points among voters without college degrees. In Michigan, whose suburban voters are one of the most-­watched barometers in American politics, the margins were narrower but still notable: Sanders won white voters without a college degree by 15 percentage points, and voters making less than $50,000 by 3 percentage points.