It is possible to have a well paying job, to live in your own house, to drive a relatively new car, and feel yourself at risk of financial disaster every day. Not a huge disaster, like a flood or a fire that rips through your home and destroys everything. For most people, a small one will do; some stroke of ill-timed fate demanding of you a couple of hundred dollars without notice.
Late night and early morning emergency room visits are especially good for this. So too electrical faults that take out some vital piece of equipment, a fridge or an oven, for instance, rather than a TV; and of course lost or stolen items of school kit are ever a source of quiet dread. A sick pet, a forgotten bill, an unavoidable tradesman's call. These are all the midnight doorknocks of modern life. They are the reality of daily life not just for the poor but for millions with mortgages, or insane rent to pay, with kids in high school or with their own increasingly heavy tuition fees to pay. 
The simple material struggles of most people who aren't ridiculously wealthy are not the daily reality of election campaigns, however. That agenda is set, as far as any such thing can be set, by the tacticians and strategists of the major parties. Sometimes they're derailed by outside events, but most days they contend with each other for control the news cycle - even as the news media that carries that signal becomes increasingly irrelevant to its dwindling number of consumers.
This is how you get someone like Trump. A monster. A bigot and a liar and a clear and present danger to the democratic architecture of the most powerful democracy in the world, he is also the logical outcome of a political system in which ever greater numbers of people see themselves as outsiders. In the end they begin to turn to the Maximum Outsider, someone who promises or even threatens to tear the whole thing down.
Neither Bill Shorten nor Malcolm Turnbull are outsiders in this vein. Clive Palmer was, but he did not have Trump's genius for hacking mass culture. We are also a long way from the dire inequality of the US, which has allowed hundreds of millions of people to slip into an economic purgatory where they are one medical bill, one accident, one stroke of bad luck from disaster. The sheer scale of the fear that squeezes at the hearts of so many people every single day is difficult to imagine. 
And yet it's with us here, too. Every day.
This is a long election campaign, and there are many days to go, but I won't hold my breath waiting for those fears to be addressed. It's not even a partisan divide. Barnaby Joyce can talk just as eloquently about the misery and fear stalking rural communities as anybody from the welfare lobby, but when politicians do address these issues they cannot help but do so through partisan rhetoric. So the suffering of a drought stricken farmer is to be measured against the fears of a woman from the city fleeing a violent partner and sleeping with her children in a car because of funding cuts to emergency shelters.
Their struggles become totemic and divisive, even though one is no less deserving of support than the other. If that should not suffice, some threatening spectre - usually foreign - can be hand-waved into a existence to distract everyone from their common interest. And in Australia as in the US, that common interest lies in constraining the runaway power of capital to absent itself from its obligations, such as paying tax, while stripping away from us any protections we might yet have from its depredations. A dairy farmer, a battered wife, a truck driver and the migrant owner of a small cafe, they all have their struggles.
For as long as politics convinces them those struggles are against each other they will never get anywhere. 
For independent news coverage, be sure to follow our Facebook feed.