Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 02:06 pm
A popular myth among the media and some on the left is that Trump won by appealing to the working class, but 2016 election data reveals that the majority of Trump voters were relatively affluent. Only 25% of those who voted for Trump in 2016 were working class.
Among people who said they voted for Trump in the general election, 35 percent had household incomes under $50,000 per year (the figure was also 35 percent among non-Hispanic whites), almost exactly the percentage in NBC’s March 2016 survey. Trump’s voters weren’t overwhelmingly poor. In the general election, like the primary, about two-thirds of Trump supporters came from the better-off half of the economy.
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Observers have often used the education gap to conjure images of poor people flocking to Trump, but the truth is, many of the people without college degrees who voted for Trump were from middle- and high-income households. That’s the basic problem with using education to measure the working class. In short, the narrative that attributes Trump’s victory to a “coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters” just doesn’t square with the 2016 election data. According to the election study, white non-Hispanic voters without college degrees making below the median household income made up only 25 percent of Trump voters. That’s a far cry from the working-class-fueled victory many journalists have imagined.
Trump created the myth that blue collar and working class people flocked to him like he was the new Reagan is simply not true. Trump was powered by Republicans who earn more than the median household income. Bernie Sanders and some progressives have bought into this myth and have been pushing Democrats to appeal more to working class voters. The problem is that Democrats haven’t lost working class voters.
It is becoming more apparent that there are a lot of reasons why Democrats lost, with voter turnout being one of the biggest. If 80,000 more Democrats cast their votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton is president today. Clinton lost for a variety of reasons, some of which do center around her own campaign but most are related to the challenge of being the first female presidential nominee in history, but the election data shows why it is dangerous to make broad general assumptions about a close result.
Trump isn’t being powered by the working class. His base is wealthier Americans, and anyone who believes that Trump is a president because of working-class voters has bought a Republican lie.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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