I’m not worried about Donald Trump’s poll numbers. His support is drawn from several groups within the right-leaning electorate that understand themselves to be held in contempt by the Republican Party’s establishment. They are correct in this understanding, but Trump’s support is not especially coherent. It includes small government tea partiers, evangelical social conservatives, and ideologically heterogeneous working-class whites. Trump is, for both personal and policy reasons, a bad fit for several of those groups. Many of his supporters will drift toward candidates who are a better fit, and Trump’s persona is based on being a winner. His campaign is not designed to survive a substantial decline in the polls, and Trump’s public tantrums will become pathetic (or rather, they will become more obviously pathetic) coming from a guy who is losing.

I’m not worried about the Bernie Sanders surge. Many upper-middle-class liberals feel that the combination of Obama’s 2012 reelection and continuing demographic change mean that Democrats can safely move further left. They think that the rhetorical compromises that Obama made to get elected in 2008. and the policy compromises Obama made in 2009-2010 to pass his health care bill are no longer necessary. They might be right or wrong, but Sanders is the only 2012 presidential candidate who is representing them.

What worries me is that all this is happening as we are six years into an economic recovery. These are the good old days of this particular economic cycle and the establishments of both parties are having a great deal of trouble accommodating (or even understanding) their own voters. When the leadership of both parties is so out of touch, and public dissatisfaction is so widespread during (relatively) good times, I worry what it will look like when the economy takes a turn for the worse.