Subject: Re: WHERE did Dem voters go?
But compared to the manufacturing laborers whose jobs have been shipped overseas, they ARE rich.

Exactly - only by comparison are they rich. They're not "moneyed," though. They're not the 1% (much less the 0.1%). They're the folks that make more money than non-degree holders, but low enough that they're certainly not "rich." They're not likely to be materially affected by the handful of Democratic policies that go after "the moneyed" (like raising taxes on people who make more than $400K or stuff like that). A mid-level staffer at the EPA or a junior professor at a state school isn't ever going to be making bank - they're better off than the warehouse employee making $50K after a few years, but not rich.

If you define "Elite" in terms of wealth and income, you're not intuiting that would include these folks.

That allows Democrats to overlook the way their policies that differentially privilege the information class over the working class - the stuff that creates that correlation between having a degree and being marginally wealthier than those without. Things like liberalized trade policy, stringent decarbonization, laxer immigration standards - even things like inflation are going to hit harder for people who work on physical things rather than pixels.

That's the problem. Democrats have adopted a lot of policy preferences that don't benefit the working class, but don't realize it because they don't benefit "the wealthy" either. It's the misdirect of "the 99%" as a framework (and why that faded, IMHO).

Even worse, if Democrats conceptualize the "Elite" as people who are really wealthy, rather than people that have degrees, it will be hard for them to respond to the complaint about not just who benefits from these policies, but who decides them. Democrats (and the progressive left generally) are very comfortable with a framework where policy questions are largely decided by institutions that are dominated by college-educated information workers - politically (the technocratic government), culturally (the credential-heavy journalism and media groups), and academically. Which is how you end up not only with Democratic policies that favor the information class and disfavor the working class, but also end up with structures that remove decision-making power from the working class and hand it over to the information class. Handing decisions over to technocrats, rather than subjecting them to political decision-making, gets Democrats the policy answers they prefer - but at the cost of removing the ability of people who aren't technocrats to have a role in shaping society.