DESPAIR AND RAGE CUTS AMONG WEALTHY REPUBLICANS AND IMPOVERISHED ONES.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL

NATE SILVER, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT


It’s been extremely common for news accounts to portray Donald Trump’s candidacy as a “working-class” rebellion against Republican elites. There are elements of truth in this perspective: Republican voters, especially Trump supporters, are unhappy about the direction of the economy. Trump voters have lower incomes than supporters of John Kasich or Marco Rubio.

But...an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump’s voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.

These figures, as I mentioned, are derived from exit polls, which so far have been conducted in 23 primary states.¹ The exit polls have asked voters to describe their 2015 family income by using one of five broad categories, ranging from “under $30,000” to “$200,000 or more.” It’s fairly straightforward to interpolate a median income for voters of each candidate from this data; for instance, we can infer that the median Clinton voter in Wisconsin made about $63,000.² You can find my estimates for each candidate in each state in the following table, along with each state’s overall household median income in 2015.³

Many of the differences reflect that Republican voters are wealthier overall than Democratic ones, and also that wealthier Americans are more likely to turn out to vote, especially in the primaries. However, while Republican turnout has considerably increased overall from four years ago, there’s no sign of a particularly heavy turnout among “working-class” or lower-income Republicans. On average in states where exit polls were conducted both this year and in the Republican campaign four years ago, 29 percent of GOP voters have had household incomes below $50,000 this year, compared with 31 percent in 2012.

Class in America is a complicated concept, and it may be that Trump supporters see themselves as having been left behind in other respects. Since almost all of Trump’s voters so far in the primaries have been non-Hispanic whites, we can ask whether they make lower incomes than other white Americans, for instance. The answer is “no.” The median household income for non-Hispanic whites is about $62,000,⁴ still a fair bit lower than the $72,000 median for Trump voters.

Likewise, although about 44 percent of Trump supporters have college degrees, according to exit polls — lower than the 50 percent for Cruz supporters or 64 percent for Kasich supporters — that’s still higher than the 33 percent of non-Hispanic white adults, or the 29 percent of American adults overall, who have at least a bachelor’s degree.

This is not to say that Trump voters are happy about the condition of the economy. Substantial majorities of Republicans in every state so far have said they’re “very worried” about the condition of the U.S. economy, according to exit polls, and these voters have been more likely to vote for Trump. But that anxiety doesn’t necessarily reflect their personal economic circumstances, which for many Trump voters, at least in a relative sense, are reasonably good.

Odds are that the people in this photo earn more than you. (Photo: Darron Cummings, AP)

GEORGE PACKER, NEW YORKER

The base of the Party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign....No Republican candidate—not even Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan—made as specific an appeal to the economic anxieties and social resentments of white Americans as Trump has. When he vows to “make America great again,” he is talking about and to white America, especially the less well off. 

The Democratic Party has a strange relationship with the white working class. Bernie Sanders speaks to and for it—not as being white but as being economically victimized. He kept his campaign alive last week, in Indiana, in large part by beating Clinton nearly two to one among whites without a college degree. Coverage of Sanders has focussed on his support among the young and the progressive, but he has also outperformed Clinton with the white working class. Even in losing, Sanders has shown that a candidacy based on economic populism can win back some voters who long ago deserted the Democratic Party. It’s hard to know whether these voters, faced with a choice between Clinton and Trump, will revert to the Republican side, stay home, or vote for a Democrat who until now hasn’t known how to reach them.

Identity politics, of a different brand from Trump’s, is also gaining strength among progressives. In some cases, it comes with an aversion toward, even contempt for, their fellow-Americans who are white and sinking. Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments—who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know. White male privilege remains alive in America, but the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-year-old man working as a Walmart greeter in southern Ohio. The growing strain of identity politics on the left is pushing working-class whites, chastised for various types of bigotry (and sometimes justifiably), all the more decisively toward Trump.

Last fall, two Princeton economists released a study showing that, since the turn of the century, middle-aged white Americans—primarily less educated ones—have been dying at ever-increasing rates. This is true of no other age or ethnic group in the United States. The main factors are alcohol, opioids, and suicide—an epidemic of despair. 

Anne Case and her husband Angus Deaton, both Princeton University economists, published a study late last year that drew national attention to rising mortality among middle-aged whites. (Yana Paskova for The Washington Post)

[ NY Times: Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.

That finding was reported by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found. ]

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A rally in Boston, in August, 2015 sought to bring attention to drug-overdose deaths. Several theories, including rising prescription-drug use, have been used to explain new findings on death rates for middle-aged white Americans. PHOTOGRAPH BY CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR / GETTYCREDIT

A subsequent Washington Post story showed that the crisis is particularly severe among middle-aged white women in rural areas:

Among African Americans, Hispanics and even the oldest white Americans, death rates have continued to fall. But for white women in what should be the prime of their lives, death rates have spiked upward. In one of the hardest-hit groups — rural white women in their late 40s — the death rate has risen by 30 percent. "  Anne Case, one of the Princeton study’s co-authors, said, “They may be privileged by the color of their skin, but that is the only way in their lives they’ve ever been privileged.

The Post’s analysis, which builds on academic research published last year, shows a clear divide in the health of urban and rural Americans, with the gap widening most dramatically among whites. progress for middle-aged white Americans is lagging in many places — and has stopped entirely in smaller cities and towns and the vast open reaches of the country. The things that reduce the risk of death are now being overwhelmed by things that elevate it, including opioid abuse, heavy drinking, smoking and other self-destructive behaviors.

White men are also dying in midlife at unexpectedly high rates. But the most extreme changes in mortality have occurred among white women, who are far more likely than their grandmothers to be smokers, suffer from obesity or drink themselves to death.

White women still outlive white men and African Americans of both sexes. But for the generations of white women who have come of age since the 1960s, that health advantage appears to be evaporating.progress for middle-aged white Americans is lagging in many places — and has stopped entirely in smaller cities and towns and the vast open reaches of the country. The things that reduce the risk of death are now being overwhelmed by things that elevate it, including opioid abuse, heavy drinking, smoking and other self-destructive behaviors.

White men are also dying in midlife at unexpectedly high rates. But the most extreme changes in mortality have occurred among white women, who are far more likely than their grandmothers to be smokers, suffer from obesity or drink themselves to death.

White women still outlive white men and African Americans of both sexes. But for the generations of white women who have come of age since the 1960s, that health advantage appears to be evaporating. This reversal may be fueling anger among white voters: The Post last month found a correlation between places with high white death rates and support for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

GEORGE PACKER, NEW YORKER

These Americans know that they’re being left behind, by the economy and by the culture. They sense the indifference or disdain of the winners on the prosperous coasts and in the innovative cities, and it is reciprocated. Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites, while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life. He plays to their sense of entitlement, but his hollowness will ultimately deepen their cynicism.

The Democrats probably won’t need the votes of the white working class to win this year. Demographic trends favor the Party, as does the bloated and hateful persona of the Republican choice. Nonetheless, the Democratic nominee can’t afford, either politically or morally, to write off those Americans. They need a politics that offers honest answers to their legitimate grievances and keeps them from sliding further into self-destruction. 




WASHINGTON POST WONKBLOG

More and more people feel like they're falling further and further behind even during the "good times." They're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore, which is just another way of saying that they're looking for scapegoats.

 This isn't just an American problem. It's an everywhere problem. All across the rich world, a new type of nationalist is either taking power or getting close to it. They often display signs of chauvinism, a sympathy for authoritarianism, and skepticism of, if not active hostility to, globalization. On that last point, a lot of them are, put more simply, anti-trade and anti-immigrant. Putin's Russia was really the first, but it's been followed by plenty of others: Erdogan's Turkey, Orbán's Hungary, and, just in the last few months, Kaczynski's Poland. There are even hints of it in Abe's Japan. And those are just the countries where the new nationalists have already won. Among the ones that haven't, France's National Front and Britain's UKIP have also made big gains.

The fact is that the working-class in rich countries have stagnated since the Berlin Wall came down and they faced increasing competition from the billions of new workers entering the global economy....People who have been hurt the most by globalization don't like it. Indeed, the working class in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and France have actually seen their inflation-adjusted incomes fall the past 30 years at the same time that hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian workers have been lifted out of extreme poverty. It's true that these rich-world workers are still, well, richer than people in the rest of the world, but that's not much of a consolation for them. That's because the things they need just to tread water—housing, healthcare, and higher education—keep going up in price while their wages do not. That adds up to a financial future where their kids could very well end up worse off than they are, something 60 percent of Americans and 85 percent of French people are afraid will happen.

If that's not depressing enough, there's more. Think about this: Economics 101 teaches us that free trade works when you redistribute (through government policy) the gains from the winners to the losers, so you'd hope that the countries that do, in fact, redistribute more would have less of a backlash against globalization. The only problem is that sure doesn't seem to be the case. Right-wing populists, after all, are just as popular in tax-and-spend France as they are in tax-and-spend-a-lot-less America. Now, maybe that's because of anti-immigrant hysteria rather than anti-trade anger. And maybe a stronger safety net isenough to get people to support a more open economy. But I doubt it. Why? Well, it goes against Psychology 1o1: people prefer jobs to welfare. Jobs give them pride, give them purpose, give them a future. You can't make up for that with just a check—although that doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we can. It just means that we shouldn't expect this to make people who have had their jobs offshored say that it was worth it since they can now buy things for less at Walmart....Trump voters don't want to hear that we need a president who will strengthen the safety net or a central banker who will weaken the dollar. They want a strongman who will stick it to their enemies at home and overseas—Putin with a New York accent.