Last year, two Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty schol­ars report­ed a star­tling devel­op­ment: a sharp rise in the mor­tal­i­ty rate among mid­dle-aged white peo­ple. The increase meant about 500,000 more deaths between 1999 and 2013 than if the mor­tal­i­ty rate had con­tin­ued to fall at the same rate as in years pri­or. The pri­ma­ry caus­es, the schol­ars not­ed, were drug use and sui­cide, along with alco­holism and relat­ed dis­eases. The spike in deaths was espe­cial­ly sharp among peo­ple with a high school degree or less.

"For all his attempts to portray himself as an outsider, Trump is the ultimate establishment candidate. He is the voice, mainly, of people who've benefitted from the rigged system."

Those find­ings were wide­ly report­ed. They coin­cid­ed with Don­ald Trump’s emer­gence as the star of the GOP pri­ma­ry race, and they helped to estab­lish the nar­ra­tive for this race. It was easy to con­nect the dots between the grim sta­tis­tics and the ris­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of Trump, a real­i­ty TV star who claims to speak for peo­ple who’ve been mar­gin­al­ized and dis­pos­sessed in Amer­i­ca — in oth­er words, the work­ing class.

The prob­lem? That sim­ple sto­ry­line doesn’t with­stand much scrutiny.

It’s true that Trump vot­ers are over­whelm­ing­ly white and tend to have less for­mal edu­ca­tion than Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers. But they aren’t pri­mar­i­ly ​“work­ing class” if that’s defined by income. A senior econ­o­mist with Gallup, Jonathan Roth­well, stud­ied the data and found that, ​“if any­thing, more afflu­ent Amer­i­cans favor Trump, even among white non-His­pan­ics.” That analy­sis squares with medi­an house­hold income esti­mates of vot­ers done by FiveThir­tyEight, based on exit polling in the pri­ma­ry sea­son. For Trump vot­ers, it was $72,000. Among Hillary Clin­ton and Bernie Sanders vot­ers, it was $61,000. The medi­an house­hold income for the states stud­ied was $56,000.

Fear and loathing

The key to explain­ing sup­port for Trump, Roth­well found, wasn’t income but anx­i­ety. Trump sup­port­ers live in cul­tur­al­ly and racial­ly iso­lat­ed areas and are afraid that they’ll soon live in a nation that’s no longer rec­og­niz­able. ​“Sup­port for Trump is high­ly ele­vat­ed in areas with few col­lege grad­u­ates,” Roth­well wrote, ​“far from the Mex­i­can bor­der, and in neigh­bor­hoods that stand out … for being white, seg­re­gat­ed enclaves, with lit­tle expo­sure to blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.”

Trump claims, nonethe­less, to be the ​“voice” of the mar­gin­al­ized, and media por­traits of work­ing class peo­ple who sup­port him have bol­stered that claim. The con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­al Fran­cis Fukuya­ma gave a pure dis­til­la­tion of the com­mon wis­dom in an inter­view with The Ezra Klein Show recent­ly: ​“The Trump can­di­da­cy rep­re­sents the for­got­ten white work­ing class that has been under­rep­re­sent­ed in Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy over the past gen­er­a­tion,” he said. ​“So they’re get­ting a voice.”

That’s wrong on two lev­els. It isn’t pri­mar­i­ly the white work­ing class that has pro­pelled Trump’s rise. And his sup­port­ers are far from for­got­ten or ignored.

In truth, their pow­er and their voice are far out of pro­por­tion to their num­bers. Among the clear­est and most destruc­tive exam­ples is the U.S. Sen­ate. Con­sid­er that the nation’s five small­est states (by pop­u­la­tion) had about 3.5 mil­lion peo­ple as of 2015, while the five largest states had some 120 mil­lion peo­ple. Gen­er­al­ly, the larg­er states are much more racial­ly and eth­ni­cal­ly diverse than the small­er states, which are over­whelm­ing­ly white. Yet the five small­est and five largest states have equal rep­re­sen­ta­tion: 10 per­cent of the votes. In a Sen­ate that’s close­ly divid­ed, and in which use of the fil­i­buster to par­a­lyze the process has become rou­tine, the over-rep­re­sen­ta­tion of white peo­ple has far-reach­ing consequences.

That stark inequal­i­ty brings into focus a deep­er real­i­ty: The sys­tem has always tilt­ed sharply in favor of the white peo­ple who make up Trump’s base. He’s not tap­ping into the frus­tra­tions of the white work­ing class so much as stok­ing the fears of rel­a­tive­ly afflu­ent peo­ple who resist the cul­tur­al, reli­gious and demo­graph­ic changes that are hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca, and are afraid of los­ing their place — their iden­ti­ty — in the emerg­ing nation. For all his attempts to por­tray him­self as an out­sider, Trump is the ulti­mate estab­lish­ment can­di­date. He is the voice, main­ly, of peo­ple who’ve ben­e­fit­ted from the rigged system.

Still winnable

The mis­per­cep­tion of Trump vot­ers cre­ates a fatal­ism about what can be done to relieve pover­ty and inequal­i­ty in the Unit­ed States, and about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of build­ing a stronger pro­gres­sive, Demo­c­ra­t­ic coali­tion. The idea that the work­ing class is a lost cause becomes a self-ful­fill­ing prophecy.

Democ­rats have lost much of the work­ing class since the era of Ronald Rea­gan. But a sub­stan­tial share hasn’t bought into Trump’s racism or the GOP’s anti-LGBT agen­da, much less Repub­li­can pre­scrip­tions for build­ing the econ­o­my. In Michi­gan — a key Mid­west­ern state that’s been hit hard by dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion — Barack Oba­ma won 45 per­cent of the white work­ing class vote in 2012. In the 2016 Michi­gan pri­ma­ry, Sanders won 23 per­cent of it. Togeth­er, he and Clin­ton won 40 per­cent of white work­ing class votes, ver­sus 27 per­cent for Trump and 58 per­cent for GOP can­di­dates overall.

That isn’t a great show­ing for Democ­rats. But con­sid­er: Sanders got near­ly as many white work­ing-class votes as Trump. There’s no rea­son to think the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty couldn’t reach more of them with an agen­da that, like the Sanders cam­paign, focus­es on their needs and pri­or­i­ties. Afford­able child care and col­lege are obvi­ous exam­ples. Ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion is less obvi­ous, but there is a mount­ing body of evi­dence about its ben­e­fits for chil­dren and its suc­cess in reduc­ing inequal­i­ty. Clin­ton, to her cred­it, has been one of its strong advocates.

Democ­rats have often been accused of roman­ti­ciz­ing the white work­ing class. Recent­ly, author Thomas Frank has indict­ed the par­ty for aban­don­ing them. But nei­ther claim is quite right. Most­ly, Democ­rats have defend­ed exist­ing pro­grams that ben­e­fit the work­ing class with­out spend­ing much ener­gy to expand them, and with­out mak­ing the case for why it makes sense, moral­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly, to do so.

Trump has par­tial­ly filled the vac­u­um left in our pol­i­tics with his own idio­syn­crat­ic brand of pop­ulism. But much of the white work­ing class has reject­ed his big­otry and false promis­es. The evi­dence sug­gests that their minds are open and their votes are winnable, if and when Democ­rats are seri­ous about reach­ing out to them.