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Enough with angry voter stories.��They are simplistic, inaccurate, and trivialize voters. They mask what is really going on in the presidential races.

These angry-voter narratives are driven by much of the media in its relentless quest to offer quick, user-friendly explanations.��Keeping the story simple wins over keeping the story straight.

Polls show that voter anger has not increased. Only about a quarter of the voters , which is about the same as it’s been in the recent past, and a little lower than it was a couple of years ago.

Though Republican voters are angrier than Democrats, the degree of Republican anger over the years has also been stable.

So anger-wise the presidential race is not exceptional at all.��Of course if you cherry pick your interviews — you know, by microphone-schmoozing with real Iowans in a real Iowa coffee shop — it is easy to find some voters who say they are angry.��

Something profound is going on.��But you need to move away from the anger narrative to understand what that is.

Start by assuming that things are more complicated.��That is what national political reporters recently did in their National Public Radio wrap-up of the New Hampshire campaign coverage.

Saying that anger links Trump and Sanders is like saying the two are alike because they both wear business suits.

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, for one, assessed what is happening as�� “a strong undercurrent of antiestablishment sentiment. You can describe it as angry. You can describe it as sort of outsider energy. You can describe it as people — the dwindling middle class.”��

Multilayered and very tentative.��And at this stage, that’s a good thing.

Describing people in terms of their anger underestimates the importance of their views.

Anger is certainly characteristic of much of the hard right like the tea party. Simply describing them as angry white people may make you feel better, but it dismissively underestimates the movement’s rise to success.

The tea party has been successful because of its organizational skills and because it has tapped into a half-century, hard-right tradition that was ready to be invigorated.��Furthermore, it quickly got support from the Republican Party and from wealthy conservative donors like the billionaire Koch brothers.��

People lump Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders together because both appeal to angry voters.��

Saying that anger links Trump and Sanders is like saying the two are alike because they both wear business suits. Their��supporters are more likely to be angry, but otherwise their differences are far greater than these surface similarities.

Sanders’s candidacy is well within the tradition of left-wing insurgent presidential candidates in Democratic Party primaries, people like George McGovern, Howard Dean, and — let’s not forget — Barack Obama.��

Like Sanders, each of these candidates was particularly appealing to young voters.��Each succeeded or failed based on his��success in ultimately getting support from the Democratic base.��

Trump is very different.��For typical Republicans, Trump is not an insurgent.��He is a subversive.����

Trump is building a populist coalition that threatens both political parties, but especially horrifies your basic conservative. ��Much of his support comes from voters who do not normally identify themselves as Republican and are not at all conservative on economic issues.

Here are three tips to get past the anger lens and make sense of what is happening:

• First, move away from the surface explanations and look more in depth at what the voters are like. The survey is an excellent example.��

It shows what Trump supporters believe rather than simply how angry they are, and it shows how these beliefs are related to broader political movements.

Compared to other likely Republican primary voters, Trump supporters are considerably more resentful toward African-Americans and immigrants.��They are more likely to view white people more positively than minorities.

Many analysts offer confident, sweeping explanations that they stubbornly hold on to even in light of contrary evidence.

Other research shows that Trump does best among voters who, like typical conservatives, are anti-immigrant but, like liberals, support Social Security.

That is an historical profile of a populist, something that is far more profound than anger.

• Second, remember the importance of context.��Anger is an emotion, while casting a vote is a behavior.

Primaries are an enormous mishmash.��Caucus and primary rules vary from state to state.��Delegates pledged to one candidate can change their minds even before the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions.

As the race goes on and candidates drop out, potential voters may have to choose a candidate whose views don’t so easily match their own. Or they might decide not to vote at all.�� Both Trump (high school-educated whites) and Sanders (the kids) rely on the kind of supporters who are not very involved with politics and have low voting turnout.

• Third, pay the most attention to analysts who, like the Times’s Haberman, are cautious, tentative, empirical, tolerant, and introspective about their views. They are constantly searching for answers.

Many analysts are quite the opposite.��They offer confident, sweeping explanations that they stubbornly hold on to even in light of contrary evidence.

Unfortunately those are the ones most likely to get on TV because they fit television’s demand for quick explanations, as in his book, “The Signal And The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t.”

So quit paying attention to the blowhards.��The separation may be hard, especially for you political junkies who love the chat shows.��But you are looking for love in all the wrong places.

Next time I’ll talk about how Hawaii’s voters fit into this.