Low-Income Americans Feel Jilted By Trump, Biden. The Rich Don't.

One of President Joe Biden's biggest challenges going into the 2024 election might be overcoming an issue that has weighed down Democrats for years: winning back working-class voters who believe Biden and his party simply don't care about their problems.

According to a joint Economist/YouGov poll published Tuesday, 39 percent of voters making less than $50,000 per year say Biden "doesn't care at all" about people like them, compared to just 17 percent of lower-income voters believe his administration cares "a lot." A similar share of middle-income voters felt the same way, with a comparable proportion of voters saying Biden "doesn't care at all" or didn't care "much" about people like them.

Meanwhile, just one-quarter of those making more than $100,000 said Biden doesn't care about them, compared to 26 percent of high-wage earners who said he cared "a lot."

The numbers represent a sharp contrast to where Biden was just two years ago at the start of his administration.

2021 Comparison

In a similar poll conducted in April 2021, approximately 27 percent of lower-wage earners said they believed Biden didn't care at all about their problems, while higher-wage earners were dissatisfied with Biden at an approximately 10 percent higher rate than they are today—feeding a persistent narrative on the right that Democrats are becoming a party of coastal elites.

The numbers appear to support the theory. Internal Revenue Service data released in 2021 showed Democrats represented roughly 65 percent of taxpayers with household incomes of $500,000 or more based on pre-pandemic figures. Other data, like a recently published analysis on Axios based on numbers from Ohio Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, show approximately 64 percent of congressional districts with incomes below the national median are now represented by Republicans.

It's a stark departure from where the party was as recently as the Obama years. Nationwide in 2016, political website Ballotpedia identified 206 counties that voted for Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump after previously voting for Democratic nominee Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012.

A Democratic Priority

"I have always been interested in these 'cares about people like me' questions because they seem so central to what matters to people but also seem to be pretty complex in terms of what they are capturing," Elizabeth Rigby, a professor at George Washington University who has studied voter demographic trends, wrote to Newsweek in an email. "I don't think they totally capture approval, representation, or whether the group's needs are being met. But, they still seem really important."

Regardless, some say that something has shifted in America's political landscape. Winning those working-class voters back, Biden has made clear, is not just a priority; it's a legacy-defining effort.

"That's always been my vision for our country: To restore the soul of the nation, to rebuild the backbone of America, the middle class," Biden said during his State of the Union address in February. "...For decades, the middle class was hollowed out. Too many good-paying manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Factories at home closed down. Once-thriving cities and towns became shadows of what they used to be. And along the way, something else was lost. Pride. That sense of self-worth."

Voter Agendas

Facing political annihilation, Biden's Democratic Party emerged from the 2022 midterm elections with an intact majority in the United States Senate largely driven by wedge issues like abortion and candidate quality. However, polling then and today show the economy and issues like inflation are still the topics driving most voters' agendas.

According to exit polls from November, Democrats lagged behind Republicans in the number of "non-college-educated" voters they'd convinced to support them, down five points from the 49 percent mark they'd reached as recently as 2018. And many blamed the economy.

A NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll from March showed the economy continued to dominate as voters' top issue, with 31 percent of all voters—including 48 percent of Republicans—describing it as their top issue. It was also top of mind with independents, of whom one-third of voters ranked the economy as a more pressing concern than preserving democracy (22 percent), healthcare (10 percent), or immigration (11 percent).

In that same poll, just 38 percent of voters currently approved of how Biden was handling the economy, including just 28 percent of independents—even amid record-low levels of unemployment and recession fears that have, so far, failed to materialize.

Voter Opinion of Biden vs. Trump

Joe Biden may have a working-class voter issue, but it isn't a problem only Democrats are having to deal with. At the height of the pandemic in August 2020, just 19 percent of people surveyed in YouGov/Economist polling earning less than $50,000 per year said they felt Trump cared "a lot" about "people like them" a number almost the same as Biden's performance with that group in polling conducted last week. The total number of low-income earners who felt Trump didn't care about their problems was higher than it currently is for Biden.

At the same juncture of Trump's presidency as Biden's today, 42 percent of people making under $50,000 per year said they felt Trump "doesn't care at all" about people like them, compared to 39 percent in Biden's latest polling. And just like Biden at this same juncture, 42 percent of high-income voters felt Trump cared either "some" or "a lot" about their problems.

Though the issue of perception is an important part of the story, the real concern is turnout. While there's little evidence either party benefits when more people vote, numerous studies show lower-income voters historically turn out to vote at lower rates than wealthier-income households.

While many claimed Trump won in 2016 because of his overwhelming appeal to working-class voters, researchers at Vanderbilt and Duke University later found in their own survey that only about 30 percent of Trump's supporters were white working-class, proving instead that his appeal to Republicans was greater than rival Hillary Clinton's was with Democrats and independents.

That development, researchers say, was rather unique compared to recent history.

"Until the past decade, there has been a consistent pattern of richer voters supporting Republicans and poorer voters supporting Democrats, on average, with this pattern varying a lot by state," Andrew Gelman, a Columbia University researcher and author of the 2008 book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State told Newsweek.

"In more recent years there has not been much difference in support for the two parties by income level," he added. " [...] In general, attitudes of poorer voters are less correlated with partisanship."

Data from the Pew Research Center show that at the time, a plurality of people earning less than $50,000 per year supported Democrats. However, that demographic also had the highest share of independents. According to their data, nearly one-quarter of people making less than $30,000 per year did not lean either way, leaving either side a broad berth to sell lower-income voters on their message.

For Biden in 2020, victory came by doing what his predecessors failed to do: meet voters where they were, and speak their language. Biden, UC-Hastings law professor Joan Williams wrote for the Harvard Business Review at the time, "talked about jobs," and most importantly, "treated working-class whites with respect," drawing a sharp contrast to Clinton's depiction of Trump supporters as "deplorables."

It apparently worked. According to 2020 exit polling from the New York Times, Biden led Trump among voters earning less than $50,000 per year by roughly 11 points. Trump, meanwhile, dominated Biden among voters making six-figure incomes or greater, winning the $100,000-plus category by double-digits.

Update 4/28/2023, 9:18 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from Elizabeth Rigby and Andrew Gelman.