MICHAEL BARONE: New Deal politics turned upside down.

Two decades ago, as Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini recently posted, “Dems used to be able to drive news cycles about Republicans being mean to the poor and seniors and this used to be a headache the GOP would have to respond to. Now,” he says, “no one cares if Dems say this.”

Democrats profess puzzlement at this, and it seems unlikely that just a few economic seasons could alter a nearly 90-year political attitude. But remember that when people are asked which party “cares about people like me,” they’re thinking also of which party cares about the people they’re hostile to. Since the 1930s, that meant many voters thought Republicans cared only about the rich and big business.

That assumption has been undermined by the process, slow since the middle 1990s, accelerated under Trump, by which affluent college graduates have been not only voting more Democratic, but have become the visible driving force in the Democratic Party, as witnessed by its emphasis on college loan debt forgiveness and net-zero green policies raising the prices of gasoline and appliances.

In this setting, modest-income voters think Republicans “care about people like me” not because they expect them to shovel out government money but because they expect Democrats to push policies that, while providing psychic income for affluent college graduates, will cost them more money for gas and food or force them to buy electric cars that conk out, washers that don’t wash, dryers that don’t dry, and heat pumps that don’t heat. New Deal politics has been turned upside down.

The New Deal built things — the modern left vows “You will never see another federal dam” and wants to put drivers on a road and gas station “diet.” In 2019, when AOC was in her Green Nude Eel monomania phase, she was in full “ban all things!” mode.