This is how Trump got elected folks. It baffles me that people don’t see this.

Socioeconomics matters more than race, gender, or sexuality because your socioeconomic status determines how much money you make and the quality of life you get to live.

In 2024, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that class — rather than race — is going to reshape the political landscape:

New fault lines are emerging in American society based more on class than race.

The shift helped deliver the White House to Donald Trump and could continue to alter the political landscape if more Americans identify themselves less in the context of race and gender and more as belonging to a certain economic class.

This is not news. This may be news to college-educated folks living in urban cities with high-paying jobs, but this isn’t news to the rest of America.

This highlights how echo chambers translates into politics.

If you look at the bylines of the reports who covered this piece, they’ve lived in places like New York, Chicago, DC, Miami, and the Triangle in NC.

They went to Cornell, Duke, and UC Berkeley. All three graduated in the 1990s.

The media has no idea what’s happening in America because the reporters reporting the news aren’t living in the same America as everyone else.

This level of ignorance about what’s actually happening in America has consequences that you might not realize.

The people who make decisions about how we’re governed and how capital is allocated within the economy are reading newspapers like the WSJ or NYT.

Their worldview is shaped by the media they consume.

If this is considered news — that people care about their economic well-being — then the people who have been making decisions in the U.S. for the last however many decades have been doing so with incomplete information.

It wasn’t a surprise to me when Trump won in 2016 and it wasn’t a surprise to me this year.

I was raised in a Rust Belt town that used to be dominated by manufacturing. My parents worked low-paying working class jobs and neither had a college degree (my mom has since obtained her BA).

Somehow I figured out how to get a college degree and leave my hometown, but that’s not the case for everyone.

But for every person like me who got out, dozens have been left behind.

I’ve struggled to understand ‘white privilege’ and other identity-based political markers given this context.

How do you tell someone from Appalachia or the Rust Belt that they’re privileged when they can’t afford to put food on the table and deindustrialization has stripped them of their opportunity to earn a living?

Socioeconomics matters. There are people in this country who have been living on the cusp of poverty and are tired of being ignored.

You don’t need to wonder how on earth Trump got elected.

Read the room and you’ll see all the evidence you need.