President Trump’s election upended the conventional view of U.S. class politics. Republicans have long been considered the party of the affluent and upwardly mobile, while Democrats have appealed to the economically disadvantaged. But many observers have suggested that Trump “tapped into the anger of a declining middle class” rooted in decades of income stagnation and growing social distress.
Katherine J. Cramer is a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker” (University of Chicago Press, 2016).