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Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin

(107,063 posts)
Tue Aug 11, 2020, 05:15 PM Aug 2020

Long a Republican Safety Net, White Middle-Class Voters Are Slipping From Trump's Grip

On Monday evening, President Donald Trump stood at the front of the White House’s briefing room and uttered yet another proposal that lacked both specifics and any probability of becoming a reality. “So, we’re looking very seriously at a capital-gains tax cut and also at an income-tax cut for middle-income families,” Trump said, echoing a promise to cut taxes before the 2018 midterms. “We’re looking at expanding the tax cuts we’ve already done, but specifically for middle-income families.”

Politically, it makes sense. Some 70% of Americans consider themselves in the middle class. (In reality, the middle class makes up around 50% of the country, although a definition is hard to nail down.) In an election year, cutting — or at least offering to cut — taxes can be appealing. In the middle of a pandemic, it’s an even sweeter promise, assuming you’re not one of the 31 million Americans who have already lost their jobs and have a lot less income to tax. Economic anxiety is through the roof and maybe the prospect of a few extra bucks in the wallet could ease some of those legitimate jitters.

But in trying to appeal to middle-class voters, Trump may have tipped us off to his biggest threat to a second term. Recent elections already indicate that the group has been drifting steadily away from Republicans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried 49% of voters earning less than $100,000 annually, outpacing Trump by 4 percentage points. Two years later, Democrats boosted that support to 56% to carry the midterms and recapture a majority in the House.

Hours before Trump spoke at the White House, a bipartisan pair of respected pollsters released their latest polls taken in battleground states. Their findings: white voters in the middle class are defecting from Trump at a pace that could send him into history books as a one-term President. The bipartisan Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service/ Battleground Poll puts the slice of the electorate in the middle class around 59% — a chunk you cannot ignore. Specifically, they found, white voters in the middle class presently account for 46% of the electorate.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/long-republican-safety-net-white-170813849.html

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