Over on YouTube there’s footage of Senator Eugene McCarthy speaking after a victory during his 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination. “What happened here,” he says, “will have to be read rather carefully by so-called political pros, who are sometimes the last to read the signs of change.” When trying to grasp what has gone wrong for the Republican establishment this year, that jibe is not a bad place to start. The party’s so-called political pros have been badly wrong-footed by a growing anger among GOP voters they either underestimated or missed altogether.

There’s a famous (if largely inaccurate) quote attributed to Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s legendary film critic. She was, it is said, puzzled by Nixon’s 1972 landslide “because she didn’t know anybody who voted for him”. When it comes to Trump supporters, Republican strategists, cocooned within the Beltway and basking in memories of Reagan, may have had the same problem. It’s a long way from Washington’s K Street — epicentre of the consultant/lobbyist class — to flyover country.   

It is no longer, to use Reagan’s term, “morning in America”, and for many working-class whites — the people who represent around half the GOP’s base — it looks a lot like twilight. There are clear signs of fraying social cohesion in this segment of the population (including a rising death rate among its middle-aged). A changing economy must bear much of the blame. Growth is not what it was and its fruits are not distributed as they were. Corporate profits are robust, but globalisation, technology and tougher management have cut a swathe through the well-paid, well-pensioned jobs that once made up America’s blue-collar dream.

Improved purchasing power mitigates matters somewhat, but on some measures, real wages for white men with only a high-school education are lower now than in the disco era. The arrival of more women into the workforce has helped take some of the edge off that decline, but real median household income in 2014 was at mid-1990s levels, some 8 per cent below where it stood just before the financial crisis, a level that was itself slightly below 1999’s all-time high. For a while, easy access to credit camouflaged the worst effects of income stagnation, but, with banks bruised and cautious, that is more elusive now. That the wicked “one per cent”, bailed-out architects, it is widely thought, of so much ruin, continue to prosper adds insult to injury.

Mounting economic insecurity has been made more painful still by the sense that the America the white working class once knew — their America, as they regarded it — is slipping away. The US has undergone a profound demographic transformation in not so many years, much of it driven by immigrants who have not only recast the country’s ethnic mix, but can also be seen as new competition in a deteriorating labour market. Meanwhile, political and media celebrations of the demise of white America may well reinforce the suspicion among its working class that they are being cast aside — or worse. One poll last year revealed that 60 per cent of working-class whites believed that discrimination against whites was just as much a problem as discrimination against African-Americans and other minorities. Capping it all, perhaps, was the election of Barack Obama, an icon of change, if not hope, so perfect that he had to be shown to be a trickster: thus the bizarre persistence of the theory that Obama was Kenyan-born (which would raise constitutional questions about his eligibility for the presidency), a secret Muslim, or both.