The rest of us?

I've had a number of posts (starting with this one) suggesting that the people who are angry about perceived contempt from "elites" are not the working class, or residents of "the heartland," but conservatives, and more specifically, conservative elites.  I ran across a striking example of that recently, in the New York Post editorial endorsing Donald Trump.  The last sentence was "Plus, it'll really tick off Hollywood." It's hard to imagine an endorsement of Joe Biden which concluded with something like that.  The editorial also had three passages complaining about the hypocrisy of "the media," plus this:  "When journalists write that the United States has 'lost its standing in the world,' they usually mean our standing at Davos cocktail parties. For the rest of us, it’s clear that Trumpism is focused on pursuing what’s best for our country."  

A few days later, I found support for my view from an unexpected source.  Jonah Goldberg writes "Real America . . . tops the long list of conservative catchphrases capturing the sense of grievance dominating so much of the right these days. Real America is 'flyover country,' a term used more by those who resent it than by those who actually use it as a term of derision. In today’s Republican mythology, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities are home to the elites—or, if you include the shores of Lake Michigan, the even more hated 'coastal elites.'"  At the beginning of this year, I had a similar observation about "flyover country," and other alleged examples of elite disdain.  

I think these examples help to explain an odd feature of this campaign, and Republican strategy over the last several years--the focus on trying to win with a minority rather than trying to build a majority.  The idea is that some voters count more than others--the party that deserves to win isn't the one that gets the most votes, but the one that gets the right kind of voters.  It's sometimes said that "the right kind" means white voters, but I don't think this is right.  Trump's efforts to appeal to black and Latino voters may be clumsy, but he makes them, and he boasts about any sign that he's doing relatively well among them.  Rather, the right kind of voter is anyone who's not "elite"--that is, college-educated and living in coastal urban areas.  He hasn't made any effort to appeal to those kind of voters, and none of his media supporters seem to have urged him to do so.  Instead, we have media elites (meant not as a pejorative term, but as an objective description) denouncing "the media" and claiming to speak for "the rest of us."