The politics of resentment: winning 2016

The 2012 election was supposed to be a test of a weakened president and his ambitious and unpopular health care plan. Challengers saw a chance to take down a Democratic incumbent after the excitement of his history-making election had faded. It didn’t work out that way.

The 2008 election was supposed to be a coronation for Hillary Clinton and a second chance for a war hero nominee. History, in the form of a genre-breaking black man with a savvy digital campaign, caught up with them both.

Stay with me here. The 2004 election elevated another war hero nominee — this one a Democrat. But John Kerry walked right into a buzz saw of conservative discontent and liberal disinterest. The country was not willing to unseat a flagging incumbent who was also a wartime president.

In each and every case and in each and every election, we scrutinized the candidates to within an inch of their lives. We analyzed their personalities, their wardrobes, their leisure hobbies. We swapped stories about who we would rather have a beer with.

But, again and again, we all but forgot to look to the voters.

If we make that mistake again this cycle, it will be our own fault because we actually have something to work with this time.

Two research reports caught my eye this week that appeared to at least begin to explain the dyspeptic public mood this year.

Why, we have been asking ourselves as we eye the polls, is a bombastic New York businessman outpacing the field? How, we wonder, can a retired neurosurgeon suddenly force his way to the front of a crowded stage? What forces, we ask ourselves, have propelled a cranky 74-year-old self-described socialist senator from a tiny state, to fill overflow arenas with people looking for a Democratic alternative?

Part of the answer seems to lie with voters in a bad mood — many of them white, and many of them middle class.

In past elections, these were not considered niche voters. They were the prime targets for candidates who figured they were more likely to show up at the polls. Black, Hispanic and women voters were more likely to be wooed with narrow, targeted appeals — the Obama campaign becoming the obvious exception.

But this year, white, middle class voters — precisely the cohort drawn to the outsider element currently on view in the primaries — are increasingly disaffected.

One new study out this week showed, perplexingly, that life expectancy for middle class whites appears to be shrinking; just as other groups appear to be likely to live longer.

What is driving this? Increased rates of alcoholism and drug abuse and suicide drove death rates up. And what is driving that? “Despair,” Princeton economist Anne Case, one of the report’s co-authors, told my colleague Judy Woodruff.

Economic distress was also driving factor, spurred by the nation’s slow and stuttering recovery from a painful recession that seemed to punish the working class the longest.

A second report, which was first published in the journal “Research on Social Work Practice” in 2012, was enlightening in a different way. “Moderately educated whites” — which is to say, those without a post-secondary degree — are becoming less religious. The report, improbably titled “No Money, No Honey, No Church,” discovered that this religious disconnect is creating a new subset of marginalized, less socialized Americans. This disengagement — which extends to marriage rates — can and does extend to politics and to politicians.

Taken together, it all begins to explain the appeal of outsiders who promise to toss the scoundrels out. It also provides a ripe proving ground for candidates who have never done this before, as well as a political conundrum for those who have conventionally used elected office as the stepping stone to the White House.

What will these voters hear? What will resonate? Is it enough to promise hope and change? Is derision enough?

This will be the test in coming months, as candidates try to come up with a new solution to a daunting problem: how to win votes from people who can’t stand the sight of you.