I can’t bring myself to hate Donald Trump. Part of this is a quirk of biography. Like a lot of native New Yorkers around my age, I find his outer-borough accent so comfortingly familiar that I can’t help but smile whenever I hear his voice, even when he’s saying something outrageously offensive. To a certain kind of smart, scrappy, lower-middle-class New York youth in the ’80s and ’90s, Trump was the living embodiment of gaudy success—a kind of mash-up of Santa Claus, Scrooge McDuck, and Vito Corleone. When I was a kid, it was not at all uncommon to hear friends and classmates declare that they wanted to be Donald Trump when they grew up. They didn’t want to be real estate developers or casino magnates. They literally wanted to be Trump, which seems doubly strange in hindsight, as so few of the kids I have in mind were white.

But nostalgia isn’t the only reason I can’t hate Trump. The deeper explanation for my ambivalence is that he is speaking for millions of Americans who’ve lost faith in the political process. Trump’s victory in the New Hampshire GOP primary was broad and decisive. He fared well among Republican primary voters across the ideological, religious, and class spectrum. As Ron Brownstein has observed, however, “[Trump’s] appeal notably lagged among both evangelicals and better-educated Republicans.” Elsewhere, in an analysis of the Iowa counties in which the various Republican counties fared best, Patrick Ruffini found a striking contrast between the counties that went for Rubio and for Trump. While the counties that went for Rubio tended to have a higher number of households with incomes greater than $200,000, more new home construction, and more adults with post-graduate degrees, the counties that went for Trump tended to have higher rates of unemployment and a higher share of adults who identify as Scots-Irish, or simply as “American.”