Eric Levitz writes:

In the primary’s early days, the media treated him like an afterthought. At cocktail parties in Martha’s Vineyard and happy hours in the East Village, economic and cultural elites agreed that the candidate was more of a has-been — or a punch line — than a serious contender for the presidency. After all, he had the ineloquent uncouthness of a pretender and the political record of a traitor; myriad activist groups within the party firmament distrusted his ideological commitment to their cause. At the early debates, the press pounced on his gaffes and declared him a goner. Coverage focused on rivalries between other candidates even as he retained pride of place in national polls. A lackluster showing in Iowa prompted autopsies for his candidacy. But once the calendar shifted from states with caucuses that discourage mass participation to ones with primaries and large non-college-educated populations, working-class voters upended elite assumptions: The man the media had deemed a joke was the man the forgotten Americans would make their president.

That paragraph summarizes one common narrative about Donald Trump’s triumph in 2016, but it just as accurately describes Joe Biden’s ascent to the White House last year. The Democrats’ big-dollar donors flocked to Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar until the anti-socialist imperative finally forced them to grudgingly ride with Biden. The party’s activist base, meanwhile, quarreled over Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders while focusing the bulk of its criticism at the aforementioned (relative) moderates. The media panned Biden’s debate performances and declared him dead after Nevada. But working-class voters in South Carolina broke hard for the former vice-president, as did non-college-educated voters (along with affluent college-educated ones) on Super Tuesday.

In November’s general election, meanwhile, Biden won 47 percent of the non-college-educated vote, according to an analysis of voter-file records from the data firm Catalist. That isn’t a majority, but it’s no negligible fraction, either. In absolute terms, Biden received more votes from working-class Americans than he did from college-educated ones. And that holds true even within the white population: The president won more total ballots from white working-class voters than from white college graduates; he also won more votes from non-college-educated whites than he did from Black voters of all stripes.

You wouldn’t know this from mainstream discourse. In sharp contrast to its post-Trump self-correction — in which outlets ordered countless insta-ethnographies of Trump’s postindustrial strongholds — the press has carried on ignoring Biden’s working-class base. [Continue reading…]