When we hear the words “MAGA base” we think “white working class.” Right?

“I love the poorly educated.” —Donald J. Trump, February 24, 2016

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” —Hillary Clinton, September 10, 2016

Eight years after Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump made this connection part of our conventional wisdom, the idea is still presented as gospel in the New York Times.

On January 15, 2024, its front page article (“How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again,”) starts with this sentence: “Working-class voters delivered the Republican Party to Donald J. Trump.” (A day earlier its online edition started with “White working-class voters are Donald Trump’s base.”)

No evidence at all is provided because none is needed, we’re all supposed to know it is true.

Not on academic research. Political scientists Noam Lupu (Vanderbilt) and Nicholas Carnes (Duke) definitively disproved the notion that most of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 were white working class. They showed that only 30 percent of the Trump voters could be considered a part of that group.

It’s time to jettison the idea that social grievances are the prime motivation. Workers are frustrated with a political establishment that has failed to halt mass layoffs, which according to our estimates have impacted more than half of all working people and their families.

The 2018 Primaries Project, at the Brookings Institute, reported that those voting in congressional Republican primaries in 2018 were better educated and richer than the public at large. Again, the white working class formed no more than one-third of the Republican primary base.

What about the January 6th insurrection? Wasn’t that a white working-class riot? Not according to the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which analyzed the demographics of the 716 individuals who had been charged with various January 6th crimes, as of January 1, 2022. Fifty percent were either business owners or white-collar workers, and only 25 percent were blue-collar workers (defined as no college degree).

The research for my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, provides new data that confirms the white working class does not in any way pour into Hillary Clinton’s “basket full of deplorables.” In fact, most white working-class voters have become decidedly more liberal on divisive social issues over the last several decades, including LGBTQ rights, immigration, and racial discrimination.

Nevertheless, the New York Times’ acceptance of the MAGA working-class canard is like a version of the old Groucho Marx line: “Who do you believe: Me (the data) or your lying eyes?”

The attacks on working-class populism have been around for more than 140 years. Corporate owners and their newspapers viciously denounced the populist movement of the late 19th century, which aggressively challenged financial and corporate power. To counter that increasingly successful movement, newspapers, as well as pro-corporate politicians, depicted the populists as ignorant bomb-throwing radicals and worse.

The modern-day attacks on the white working class began during the 1950s as political scientists sought to account for the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who cruelly attacked anyone he suspected of radical sympathies. Thousands lost their livelihoods........

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