The Morning: A new insight into Trump’s rise
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2024-07-25 12:36
Good morning. We’re covering a significant economic change and its effect on American politics — plus Biden’s speech, Kamala Harris and lab-grown meat.
Falling behindA common theory about Donald Trump’s appeal is that working-class white people feel they fell behind as other groups pulled ahead. He recognized the sentiment and spoke to those voters’ concerns. It turns out that those concerns are grounded in real economic changes, a new study from Harvard researchers shows. The researchers analyzed census and tax records covering 57 million children to look at people’s ability to rise to the middle and upper classes — their mobility — over two recent generations. They found that it had improved among Black people and deteriorated among poor white people, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows:
The study’s full findings are nuanced, as Ashley and I explain in a story that The Times published today. Black people still, on average, make less money than white people, and the overall income gap remains large. But Black Americans who were born poor have gained ground while their white counterparts have lost some, narrowing the longstanding gap. That shift can help explain why some voters’ attitudes have changed over the past couple of decades. Cutting in lineAfter Trump won in 2016, many journalists — myself included — turned to the sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s book on the American right, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” to try to understand what had happened. Hochschild provided a helpful analogy, one that resonates with the Harvard study’s findings. It goes something like this: White working-class people in red states saw the American dream as a queue moving people to prosperity. Over the past several decades, thanks to globalization and other changes, the queue stopped moving. And other groups have moved to the front of the queue. As a result, working-class white Americans often believe that their shrinking mobility is the result not just of outside forces like globalization but also of other groups that supposedly cut ahead. The Harvard study suggests that white working-class conservatives were right when they felt their own mobility had slowed, or even reversed, compared with that of Black Americans. (The researchers did not find significant changes for other racial groups.) The study also found that white people born into high-income families have seen their mobility improve — meaning the drop in mobility is restricted to the white working class. Trump has benefited from that reality. He has tapped into the resentment many white voters feel toward people of other races with his inflammatory and at times racist rhetoric, such as when he suggested Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. He has also criticized rich elites — which includes people who gained mobility as the working class lost out. As a result, some working-class white voters flipped from the Democratic Party to Trump between 2012 and 2016. Trump continues to have strong support from those voters, polls show. Of course, the evidence does not justify racial resentment. Economists say the queue analogy doesn’t reflect how the economy actually works. A growing, healthy economy creates more queues to prosperity; it’s not zero-sum, as the analogy suggests. In fact, the Harvard study found that white mobility had diminished least in the places where Black mobility had improved most. And while Black mobility has improved, it has not improved anywhere near enough to eliminate wide racial gaps between Black and white people. Gaps have narrowed, not closed. Still, Trump has tapped into many white voters’ fears that they have been left behind while other lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have focused on policies that help minority groups. The Harvard study helps show why Trump has been able to do that. Insights for both sidesThe new research can also help explain changes among Black voters. They have slightly shifted toward Trump since 2020, polls show. One possible explanation is that some Black voters’ economic gains have allowed them to focus more on noneconomic issues — such as abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights — on which they are more conservative than typical Democrats. Experts not involved with the study said that it would reverberate across the political spectrum. “The left and the right have very different views on race and class,” Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford, told me. “The value of the study is that it brings some unimpeachable evidence to bear on these questions.” For more
Biden’s Speech
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Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was unkindly. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —German Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.
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