I see no strong reason to believe it's either. And I don't think that those who 'study' this (because they think it's a 'problem' that needs a 'solution') really care about it either. What they want to do is fit the whole Trump Presidency into wider narratives and minimize the possibility of something similar happening ever again. This doesn't mean finding out their problems and addressing them sincerely. It means finding ways to fool them into reinterpreting their problems as no longer problematic (for example, by connecting their concerns to racism narratives and then shaming them for being 'racist' in the hope that they'll cease resisting) and then going on as usual.

Race > Class on the contemporary Left, so the predominant globohomo strand has an ulterior motive for interpreting it as demographics. This explanation much better fits their wider narrative.

By contrast, economic anxiety doesn't really fit their narrative. They don't want Whites to be viewed as losing in the economy or anywhere else, because they want to analogize Whites to the bourgeoisie, to people who 'have it all', who always succeed by ensuring that others can never challenge them. They simply pursue a racialized version of the usual bourgeois-proletarian dichotomy, one in which White maps onto bourgeois and non-white maps onto proletarian. White/bourgeoisie are 'oppressors'; non-white/proletariat are 'victims'. Anything that contradicts this narrative is deemed problematic—as victim blaming, perpetuating oppression/privilege, etc.

Remember, most people believe that Chauvin, Rittenhouse and a whole heap of others are 'White supremacists', despite having zero evidence. We, of course, have evidence to the contrary, such as that Chauvin had an Asian wife, which must be ignored or reframed in a way that fits the narrative. Being a straight White man whose interests clashes with those of any other person automatically gets one reinvented as a White supremacist. Similarly, a non-white who commits a crime 'becomes' White. It doesn't matter whether it's Ahmed Anissa (an Arab is a brown man when he's being bombed in the Middle East, but is a White man when he goes on a shooting spree), Marquise Love, or Zimmerman (both of whose photos in the media showed them as looking far lighter than they actually are). We see that this same 'logic' plays out with other groups. J's are White/Western when wanting Americans and their lapdogs to bomb Arabs or Persians; J's are non-white, non-western 'people of colour' under most other circumstances.

Has anyone noticed that news articles conveniently omit that Long killed two Whites for the same reason? To fit the narrative, he needed to be framed as 'racist' and 'sexist' in order to hit as many birds as possible with one stone... hence the real problem is not that he killed eight people, but that he killed six Asian women. Because the two White victims make him look much more indiscriminate, these two need to be written out of history so that the shooting appears to be part of a wider narrative; one of White/male oppressors and non-white/female victims. Long's actions have been great for the Left simply because they can be interpreted as fitting both the racism and sexism narrative. We know that if Long was black the outcome would be vastly different—the sexism narrative could still be pulled, but being of any higher race accusing blacks of being sexist is racist. The story would be useless to all wider narratives and thus canned quickly.

In light of these developments, for obvious reasons it is increasingly absurd to trust anything coming from the MSM. 'Economic anxiety' would paint as Whites as oppressed, victims, underprivileged etc. That's exactly the opposite of what the tens of millions of Left-wing cultists out there are used to hearing. Nobody is going to tell them otherwise simply because contradicting this narrative gets one 'cancelled'. This helps create a self-fulfilling prophecy, a feedback loop—they're told exactly what they want to hear both because true believers and those who don't want to upset them out of fear of punishment (and almost everyone fits one of these two groups) tell it to them. Thus their own narratives are increasingly 'objective truths', questioned only by 'ignorant', 'stupid' and 'evil' people who are 'inbred redneck hillbillies' wearing MAGA hats, and their Russian propagandist masters.