You could make that argument. I would not, though.

Instead, I'd say that there is a large segment of the public (some retirees, some not) for whom things just don't work the way that they used to- not because of their race, though.

Time was, you were supposed to be able to go to school, work hard, save, buy a home and retire. Basically all these things have been screwed with and screwed with badly, and in all likelihood will continue to be screwed with further.

Most candidates, to the people we're talking about, take on people's problems as 'campaign themes' and then don't do much about them- like a shampoo company deciding that saying they're in favor of your positive body-image, because that'll get you to buy them. And the debates between them tend to either be real nuance-fests or generally off-topic for what's by-now seen as an emergency.

Also... (and I say this as someone with a foot in academia myself... these folks don't care about academic terms and descriptions. They don't care about privilege theory, they don't care about global-scale macroeconomics, and so on- from their vantage, it just keeps looking like people taking things away, and someone- always, someone- telling them that it was just and right that it happened- from the pro-corporate-subsidy people to the pro-wealth-concentration people, to the pro-TPP guys saying how it's nativist and wrong to not want to export jobs (when it will never be the pro-Free Trade people's jobs on the block), and so on.

Internationally, bold action appeals to these voters, and hedging your bets doesn't. Awful though many of Trump's proposals are, you can't say they're vague and addressing trends and statistical probabilities.

(It's like the difference between the guy who says you can lower crime rates long-term by addressing education- even oblique stuff like using unleaded gas- but it will take some time, and the guy who says 'screw 'eventually', let's start gating the community and patrolling it now.)

So, this may not be the popular answer (not in a 'so edgy' way, just that it's not common), but I would argue that the fact that Trump's not patiently stating a detailed position, isn't obviously marketing-driven- he's more like a runaway truck. And above all, he's from the world of the familiar. He's the 80s. He's the guy on the reality show from way back.

There are other arguments to be made (like, the GOP has been making hay out of most of the things Trump has been doing- ad hominem attacks and insinuations, divides on ethnic/racial grounds (a la the Southern Strategy), the mythology of the 'plain-speaking outsider who's gonna fix everything', the lionization of business experience as a qualifier for high office, et cetera. And he's just better at that stuff, the way a shark is better at swimming than a person.) but to say it's just race is probably oversimplifying.