The narrative from liberal blogs and pundits is that poor, white-trash rednecks turned out in huge numbers to elect Donald Trump because they are stupid, or racist, or both racist and stupid.

The reality is that this narrative is not only wrong, but shows a distinct richsplaining class bias.

There is also the narrative that millennials are also responsible because they didn't get a pony, but that's for another day.

"The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin."

- National Review

“Donald J. Trump won the presidency by riding an enormous wave of support among working-class whites.”

- NYT, Nate Cohn

Here's how the trick is performed.



The white working class has received enormous attention since Election Day thanks to its critical role in electing Donald Trump the next president. Exit polls show he won this group — defined as white adults over 25 without a four-year degree — by an overwhelming margin of 39 percentage points.

The obvious question is "who in their right mind would define it that way?"

Nobody, that's who.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never got a bachelor’s degree.

Class is about income and wealth, not education.

Trump voters were not more likely to be unemployed, compared to non-Trump voters. Income-wise, the single largest group of Trump supporters was comprised of individuals hailing from households earning incomes of more than $100,000 a year—which made up 35 percent of all his voters. Those earning between $75,000 to $100,000 a year accounted for 19 percent of Trump voters, meaning that 54 percent of the president’s supporters came from households earning over $75,000 a year. Another 20 percent of Trump supporters earned between $50,000 to $75,000 a year, putting them over the national median household income, which has long hovered around $50,000. In sum, approximately three-quarters of Trump voters were from households earning more than the national median income, while just one-quarter earned less than the median.

Of households earning over $100K, Trump got a marginally higher percentage of the vote than Hillary.



In other words, upper-income groups were overrepresented in the voting electorate as a whole, and both candidates drew a disproportionate part of their vote from the well-to-do, with Trump a bit more reliant on high-income voters.

Of the 135.5 million white Americans without degrees, only about a fifth voted for Trump.

So you see the problem.

The election that gave us Trump wasn't the result of racist, white, Archie Bunker hicks.

It was the result of well-off middle-class and upper-class voters, who may very well be just as racist as the stereotypical poor 'deplorable' redneck.

However, this factoid doesn't fit into the upper-class narrative.



It's also the same voters that the Democratic Party is pandering to so hard today.



There are some seventeen million small-business owners without that degree. As a 2016 survey by the National Small Business Association tells us, 86 percent of small-business owners are white, they are twice as likely to be Republicans as Democrats, almost two-thirds consider themselves conservative (78 percent on economic issues), and 92 percent say they regularly vote in national elections.

They drew an average salary of $112,000 in 2016 compared to $48,320 for the average annual wage. Add in the spouses, and this classically petty-bourgeois group alone could more than account for all the twenty-nine million of those lacking a college degree who voted for Trump.

The petty-bourgeois store-owner. Hmm. I believe Marx had something to say about them, and who they self-identify with.

“But the idea that it is the mostly poor, less-educated voters who are drawn to Mr. Trump is a bit of a myth.”

- Economist

That's not to say the Dems don't have a serious white working class problem.

It's just that the problem is that the Dems don't have a product worth buying.



The decline of working-class Democratic voters between 2012 and 2016 was much bigger than the rise of working-class Republican voters in the “Rust Belt Five.” Among those earning less than $50,000 a year there, the decline in Democratic voting was 3.5 times greater than the rise in Republican voting. Among white voters in general, the decline in Democratic voting was 2.1 times greater than the growth in Republican voting.

So then why did liberals embrace this myth that Trump won the white working class?

Even to the point of saying Democrats should give up on them and let them go?

For starters, there is a useful class element.

At the same time, many progressive thinkers are touchy about how little they’ve done to connect with, and fight for, working-class folks—the people who clean their offices, make their shampoo, take their blood pressure, haul their garbage and sell them their garden furnishings. The notion that those people have been turned into a bunch of right-wing racists, nativists and misogynists is perhaps subconsciously useful when it comes to rationalizing that failure.

...Establishment Democrats find it useful to continue smearing the white working class as a bunch of despicably racist and sexist rubes and reactionaries. This absolves them, they think, from their ongoing refusal to properly address the needs of the nation’s economically embattled working-class majority.

Except that it doesn't absolve them at all.

It doesn't change their election failures, nor will it prevent their election failures to come.

The only ones buying it are already in the Amen Choir.

On the other side of the coin, Republicans are eager to embrace the myth that Trump has the support of a great, popular, heartland “base”.

If you get told the lie enough times you might start believing it.

In the end, the real story here isn't a shift of Obama voters switching to Trump.

It's a story of the white working class not voting because the Dems didn't offer them anything.



Compared with 2012, three times as many voters in the Rust Belt who made under $100,000 voted for third parties. Twice as many voted for alternative or write-in candidates. Similarly, compared with 2012, some 500,000 more voters chose to sit out this presidential election. If there was a Rust Belt revolt this year, it was the voters’ flight from both parties.

In short, the story of a white working-class revolt in the Rust Belt just doesn't hold up, according to the numbers. In the Rust Belt, Democrats lost 1.35 million voters. Trump picked up less than half, at 590,000. The rest stayed home or voted for someone other than the major party candidates.

Make no mistake - voters and non-voters think very differently.

Non-voters tend to be poor and politically progressive.





So the narrative is right about one thing - Dems should give up on white working class Trump voters.

Instead they should focus entirely on motivating the non-voters to vote.

To do that they must stop telling people what can "never ever happen", and start creating a positive vision of the future with a message for everyone, not just for certain identity groups.