“We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated,” said the Republican presidential front-runner about a month ago after a decisive win in the Nevada caucuses.

Certainly Donald Trump has a special way of saying stupid things, even if what he really meant contains a kernel of truth. So many of us laughed at Donald, but we also laughed at anyone who would vote for him as obviously too stupid, too uneducated to understand what they were doing.

The facts are the facts and it is true that Trump does very well among with the less formally educated.

But if we think about it for a moment, it’s not hard to figure out why.

“I think it is incorrect to look at the data and conclude that those voters are more ignorant,” Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview [with Jennifer C. Kerr at the Associated Press]. “Instead, there’s a strong correlation between having a college degree or not, and your economic situation in life.” Cramer continues, “These are folks who have been feeling a real struggle to make ends meet for decades now and they see a candidate coming along who says to them, ‘You’re right. You’re not getting your fair share. It sucks. And I’m going to stand up for you.'”

Professor Cramer uses a term that’s been around a long time, the “politics of resentment,” to describe what’s going on. “It’s when a candidate taps into the economic stress and gives people something concrete to blame. Trump is able to direct people’s profound uneasiness with their situation in life at a target” — the government, trade policies, or a group of people.”

If Professor Cramer is right, and I think she is, Democrats should wonder why they aren’t having more success with voters who are “feeling a real struggle to make ends meet.” Aren’t Democrats the ones who want to help? But, and this is the point, it’s not about what is being said, but how it is being said.

Many Democrats, me among them, have proudly pointed to the highly intelligent policy debates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have had on several occasions as proof of our political and intellectual superiority. We have marvelled at how crude Donald Trump has been with almost everything he has said, but there is little doubt he has connected with his supporters in a visceral way.

And for the Bernie Sanders supporters, I like his message, and if he were teaching a graduate seminar, I’d be taking notes. I just don’t know that he is reaching less privileged voters with the way he is framing his argument. As for Hillary Clinton, not so much either.

But speaking of the Clinton name, and holding aside what he did and didn’t do as president, Bill Clinton successfully campaigned as someone who “felt their pain.”

Times have changed and perhaps feeling voters pain is no longer the line that will work, but feeling voter’s frustration is an approach that has clearly worked for Trump and resonates with his supporters.

As awful as Donald Trump has been on issue after issue, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, Democrats need to pay more attention to why he’s done so well with the poorly educated. I’m not saying Democrats should follow him into the gutter by appealing to every obnoxious prejudice held by voters, but that they grasp the need to connect with voters’ felt experiences and move somewhat away from the wonkishness those of us lucky enough to have gone to school love so much.

If Trump had any ability to speak intelligently, he wouldn’t have said he “loved the poorly educated.” He would have said that he acknowledged and respected the challenges faced by Americans not able to access higher levels of education and that he valued their support and would work with them to provide greater opportunities for them and their families.