Casting themselves as outsiders allows them to ‘punch up’ at Middle American Trump voters.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE S ince disaffected white voters in Middle America first flocked to the person of Donald Trump on the 2016 campaign trail, an entire cottage industry of think-pieces, op-eds, and explainers has sought to “debunk” the popular conception of the MAGA-hat voter base as a dispossessed or marginalized demographic. The argument goes something like this: Trump’s “working-class-fueled victory that many journalists imagined” is a myth — actually, “many Trump voters” live in “reasonably good” economic circumstances. His electorate was “driven by fear of losing status, not economic anxiety” — in fact, “it wasn’t the economy, but racism and xenophobia that explained Trump’s …
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