ArcaMax

No surprise that Deez Nuts went viral. After someone asked Public Policy Polling, a nonscientific online polling operation, to include Deez Nuts in its surveys, he drew 8 percent in Minnesota and 7 percent in Iowa in head-to-head matchups with Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton -- only through word-of-mouth.

Tom Jensen, PPP's director, attributed the Deez Nuts surge to how these days "the voters don't like either of the people leading in the two main parties, and that creates an appetite for a third-party candidate."

Of course, issues do matter. But the early polling indicates Trump has tapped into a simmering, broadly based discontent that defies the usual partisan and ideological lines.

For example, a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in July found the "broad majority" of Trump's supporters hailed from two groups: voters with no college degree, and voters who say that immigrants weaken America.

That suggests how Trump's rise expresses a frustration with being on the losing end of industrial and demographic change. Those changes include the hollowing out of jobs and white working class values and culture, as conservative Charles Murray details in his book "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010."

Some see the rise of Trump as a sign of an ominously rising identity politics much like the racial, ethnic and gender identity politics that the right often decries on the left.

In an essay headlined, "Are Republicans for Freedom or White Identity Politics?" Ben Domenech, publisher of the libertarian-oriented The Federalist, ominously compares Trump's rise to the resurgence of far-right, anti-immigrant identity politics in Britain, France, Spain, Greece, Scandinavia and other Western democracies since the 2008 economic crisis.

"Identity politics for white people," he points out, is not the same as "racism." I agree, despite the obvious overlap. After all, before the rise of the modern civil rights movement, "identity politics for white people" was pretty much taken for granted.

But at a time when, as Murray's data show, income inequality has risen dramatically since the 1950s along class and education lines, I think both parties have to recognize something. There's a growing social, political and economic gap between the party elites and the regular working class and middle class people whose votes they seek.

In that gap, Trump sees opportunity -- and he's taking it.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.