Despite President Donald Trump’s message of affordability resonating with working class Americans in 2024, that pattern is shifting as “diverging fortunes for wealthy and poor Americans” “has tanked confidence in the economy—and the president who promised to solve the affordability crisis in the U.S.,” writes Sasha Rogelberg in Fortune.
“While a wave of working-class voters flooded the Republican party ahead of the 2024 presidential election, that same group sent a loud message in the early November off-year elections, electing Democrats in every single race in which they were running,” Rogelberg writes.
Economists, she notes, say that all Trump has done thus far is made the rich richer and the poor poorer.
“Apollo chief economist Trosten Slok noted wage growth for the lowest-income Americans plummeted to its lowest in about a decade, while wage growth for the highest-income group surpassed all other income levels, citing data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta,” she notes.
The housing market, she says, has become “frozen,” because “it’s simply unaffordable to sell your house and buy another one with mortgage rates above 6 percent.”
The Amherst Group CEO Sean Dobson says that “We’ve probably made housing unaffordable for a whole generation of Americans.”
Much of these indicators, Rogelberg says, can be traced directly to Trump, according to Pantheon Macroeconomics analysts Samuel Tombs and Oliver Allen.
“Data show wage growth has slowed more in the trade and transportation sector, and to a lower level, than any other major sector since the end of last year. Fears workers would be able to secure larger wage increases in response to the tariffs look highly unlikely to be realized,” the analysts write.
Under Trump, the economy is what Peter Atwater, adjunct professor of economics at William & Mary, calls K-shaped, in which different sectors or groups experience wildly different outcomes, like the two diverging arms of a “K”.
“What we have today is a small group of individuals who feel intense certainty paired with relentless power control—and on the other, it is a sea of despair,” Atwater tells Fortune. “And that’s the piece that never gets talked about.”
Robert Armstrong agrees with Atwater in his Financial Times column in which he writes, “It could be that after five years of going nowhere, households in the bottom half of the wealth and income distributions have started to anticipate a bleaker future and are changing their spending habits accordingly.”
Rogelberg says that “nose-diving confidence in the U.S. economy is reflected in the attitudes of Republicans and independents who voted for Trump.”
According to a national NBC news poll, about 30 percent of Republicans believe Trump has fallen short of their expectations regarding the economy.
Two-thirds of independents blamed Trump for increasing inflation, per an ABC News/Washington Poll poll, and CNN polling data shows Trump’s approval rating has reached its lowest level since he took office the second time.
Peter Loge, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, who served as senior advisor to the FDA commissioner under President Barack Obama says that Trump’s abysmal economy is a clarion call for change.
“People want to know that they can afford a medical bill if they get sick, their kids will have a better future than they do, or have a chance of a better future. And if voters feel like things aren’t working, they fire their politicians in charge to hire new ones,” Loge says.
“Voters are pretty well saying, ‘We don’t think whatever the Republicans are doing is making stuff less expensive. We need life to be more affordable and less chaotic. It’s pretty unavoidably chaotic. Now we’re going to bring in new people to try a new thing,’” Loge adds.
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