Vox’s Dylan Matthews wants the media to stop making excuses for Trump supporters. The Trump phenomenon isn’t about “post-industrial decay,” he writes. It’s not happening because “neoliberal capitalism is failing.” Such depictions, by Beltway media types on one side and “leftists and social democrats” on the other, willfully ignore the obvious.

“The press has gotten extremely comfortable with describing a Trump electorate that simply doesn’t exist,” Matthews says. If you want to know the Trump supporters’ concerns, you just have to look at what they’re saying in polls: It’s about racial resentment. It’s about white nationalism. Matthews has the data to prove it.

For one thing, they’re not working class, or even economically struggling; “Trump’s supporters are not the wretched of the earth.” Matthews points out that at the national level the median income of Trump’s primary voters was higher than Hillary Clinton’s. Support for Trump in polls was “correlated with” higher income, even among whites. Yet, perversely, the media has been pumping out feature stories about the fervor for Trump in hardscrabble places like Leetonia, Ohio, or Creston, Iowa — places that, statistically, don’t even exist by Matthews’s calculations.