Frank Bruni

 

A gazillion or so news cycles ago, by which I mean last December, Joe Biden called a voter at one of his campaign events in Iowa “a damn liar.” I remember it because several pundits on TV talked about what a bad moment for the former vice president it was, and I disagreed. From a strategic standpoint, I thought it was a good one.

The voter had brought up Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine, accused Biden of corruption and, for good measure, told Biden that he was too old to be president. Biden didn’t just sputter “liar” but also challenged the voter to a push-up contest — which, I’m sad to report, didn’t happen.

 

Was Biden’s response elevated, dignified? Nope. But what Donald Trump has long understood and what Democrats too often forget is that there are many voters who don’t prioritize those attributes, who associate them with disconnected elites and who equate them with phoniness.

This point comes across instructively and forcefully in a new book, “Trump’s Democrats,” to be published next month. Written by the college professors Stephanie Muravchik and Jon Shields, it closely examines voters in three communities — one in Rhode Island, one in Iowa and one in Kentucky — that were firmly Democratic until Trump came along.

And it makes the case that what drew these voters to him wasn’t his policy promises, which is why they may well stick with him even though many of those promises weren’t kept. Trump’s personality, style and even character appealed to them, because they processed those so much differently than Trump’s opponents did. That difference owes plenty to socioeconomic class.

The three communities in question vary in their population densities, their prevalence of immigrants and their economic engines. But in all three, “Few adults have college educations, and their incomes are modest,” the book’s authors write.

 

In Trump they see someone who doesn’t condescend to them, doesn’t sand away his rough edges and behaves in culturally familiar ways. “Many of the local Democratic leaders in the communities we studied are Trumpian,” the authors write. “They are brazen, macho and never let an insult slide.” The voters studied by Muravchik and Shields also put less stock in the “norms” that many of the rest of us worry about than in a politician’s pledge to take care of them, no matter how he or she does that.

According to the authors, Trump’s “relentless counterpunching” and refusal to apologize or admit error don’t always come across as thin-skinned. They can seem to be a legitimate, and tough, defense of honor.

 

 

In a recent telephone conversation, Shields told me that Trump sends these voters appealing “class signals,” such as his frequent wearing of baseball caps. They didn’t get those same signals from Hillary Clinton, he said.

“I don’t mean this as a criticism,” he added, “but I think Hillary reeked of her class, and I think that was Mitt Romney’s problem, too.”

 

That may well be an accurate appraisal of what some voters, like the ones in Shields’s book, made of Clinton versus Trump, but it’s enraging: Trump lives a more gilded life than Clinton does, and in what sane universe do his extravagantly fussed-over hair and obvious fondness for tanning beds make him a man of the people?

In any case, Biden’s style is little like Clinton’s or Romney’s. It actually overlaps to a limited extent with Trump’s. As my colleague Jennifer Senior wrote in a column last weekend about Biden’s political evolution: “Ever the car salesman’s son, Biden expressed, throughout his first primary, some level of cultural estrangement from the elite, just as Trump does now.”

 

 

Many of Trump’s fans take his sloppy, even vulgar use of language as a badge of authenticity; many of Biden’s fans surely interpret his “corkscrew speaking style,” as Jennifer called it, the same way. “And both men have faulty filtration systems,” she observed. That’s quite possibly an asset.

When Biden said a few years ago that he wishes he were in high school with Trump and could “take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,” he probably did himself more political good than harm.

 

Similarly, “damn liar” is less gaffe than gift, a flash of anger understandable when both your child and your ethics are being maligned. And what I’m hoping and looking for in Biden’s big speech tomorrow night isn’t soaring oratory but something blunter. That’s not going to scare off the scholars at Democratic think tanks. But it just might endear him to another audience of voters.