YOU WENT FULL PAULINE KAEL, MAN. NEVER GO FULL PAULINE KAEL:

Terry Brown is a 55-year-old plumber in Stanley, a small North Carolina town that is 90 percent white and whose motto is “Jesus Saves.” He is the sort of person media elites and coastal liberals allegedly overlooked or scorned before Donald Trump’s surprise victory.

These arrogant sophisticates, we are told, live in a world of people just like themselves, making them incapable of understanding the real America. So Trump’s victory hit them like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky.

Brown, however, was not surprised. “I don’t know anyone who would vote for Hillary Clinton,” he told Los Angeles Times reporter Jenny Jarvie the day after the election.

He doesn’t know anyone who would vote for Clinton? That’s quite a feat, because 60.5 million of his fellow Americans did. Apparently, there are Trump voters who live in their own bubbles — distant from and deaf to ordinary people who think differently.

* * * * * * * *

With polls in hand, the media concluded that the electorate, including working-class white men in small towns, had seen through Trump. That was the ultimate media failure: not expecting too little of these voters but expecting too much.

—Steve Chapman, the Chicago Tribune, “Trump and the media ‘failure.’”