Even before Donald Trump’s shocking victory last November, the press had already written the story of his rise. Despite studies showing that, like all Republican candidates, well-off whites formed the core of Trump’s support, pundits zeroed in on his white working-class backers, which most commentators defined solely in terms of education (whites without a college degree).

This dividing line ignored other crucial variables — such as income, self-identification, and occupation — but it fit with the popular belief that, from the office cubicle to the voting booth, the postindustrial “New Economy” separated the intelligent from the ignorant in a virtuous meritocracy.

By the time Hillary Clinton conceded to Trump, non-college whites had become conflated with both the working class and racism itself. The Trump campaign, as one pundit argued, “laid bare the racial animus within the white working class and the Republican Party.”