Last week, Bernie Sanders made a seemingly uncontroversial comment about the intersection of class and voting, and the punditocracy exploded with derision and contempt.

It all started with an NPR post commenting on the seeming oddity of Hillary Clinton, not Sanders, winning most of the states with the highest levels of income inequality. “[T]his doesn’t necessarily mean that Clinton is beating Sanders at appealing to voters on the basis of inequality,” the report acknowledged, noting that Clinton’s dominance in the high-inequality South — driven by her overwhelming support from older African Americans (see Figure 1) — likely explained the correlation.