The Democrat-friendly mainstream media frown on wealthy Republicans running for office. These politicians cannot possibly understand the common, hard-working taxpayers of America.

Make the rich man a liberal Democrat and we see far less concern.

“Is Mitt Romney too rich to be president?” asked a headline in U.S. News & World Report, when the Republican former Massachusetts governor ran for president in 2012.

“Mitt Romney’s ‘rich guy’ problem,” declared a Washington Post headline.

“Why Romney’s success reads as out-of-touch,” says the headline on a CNN print story.

Anti-conservative media consistently referred to the former Massachusetts governor as a “1 percenter” who didn’t know the struggles of putting food on the table.

To prove Romney was no Joe Sixpack, the Associated Press asked if he liked car racing. Romney said he had “a few great friends who are NASCAR team owners.” The media devoured him.

ABC used the NASCAR comment to answer “Is Mitt Romney Out of Touch?”

“Romney’s NASCAR Comment Is Rich,” said a headline in The Atlantic.

The Washington Post used the comment to contextualize Romney as “a wealthy, out-of-touch elitist.”

ABC News broadcast a big story about Romney lending his campaign $8.5 million.

From Romney to Ross Perot, to Steve Forbes, to Donald Trump, legacy media and other Democrats make a scandal of wealthy Republicans self-funding campaigns.

With Romney’s net worth between $190 and $250 million, consider U.S. Rep. Jared Polis. Estimates place the Colorado Democratic gubernatorial nominee’s net worth as high as $468 million – nearly twice “rich guy” Romney’s highest valuation.

Polis has lent his campaign $22 million – breaking all Colorado and most national self-finance records. Informed observers expect his personal financing to top $30 million or more before Election Day.

Polis began his political career in the year 2000, spending $1.2 million running for the Colorado Board of Education. His incumbent opponent scraped together $10,000 from donors trying to keep up. Polis won by 90 votes.

Because Polis needs no wages to survive, he took a legal five-year hiatus from income taxes in the early 2000s. That is something a worker with three jobs and a mortgage cannot do.

No one should begrudge Polis his wealth, his willingness to spend on his campaign or his legal use of the tax code.

We are merely perplexed by the disinterest in a possible disconnect between Polis and the ordinary people he seeks to represent.

The campaign has gained national attention, but we see no NASCAR-style questions, “out-of-touch” headlines, or serious demands for more information about his personal finances from local, state or national media. We aren’t seeing the candidate’s opposition to income-tax cuts told in the context of his tax vacation.

Scarce articles about the candidate’s taxes read like campaign statements, not exposés on the distinction between the middle class and the top 1 percent.

“Colorado gubernatorial candidate Jared Polis didn’t pay taxes because he didn’t owe any,” explains a Sept. 10 Denver Post headline.

Only 9News anchor Kyle Clark, whom we recently picked on, gave Polis conventional rich-guy treatment.

“The Polis campaign’s sanctimoniousness about not accepting campaign donations of over $100 assumes that you, the voters, are dumb. That you don’t know Polis has poured $1.4 million of his own money into the race,” Clark reported on air last spring. “…even then-candidate Donald Trump was more transparent. He said he wasn’t beholden to big interests because he’s rich… The Polis campaign pretends it’s some kind of moral high ground. It’s not a high ground. It’s just a pile of Jared Polis’s money.”

That was a notable exception to the deafening dearth of scrutiny directed at one politician’s big pile of cash. Polis gets a pass Republican 1 percenters cannot comprehend.