Who is a middle-income American? For much of the nation, the answer is simple: it’s me, and perhaps people who earn less than I do. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, released Friday, showed the overwhelming majority of the public — 90% — defining a “middle-income household” as families […] Read more »
Why Americans All Believe They Are ‘Middle Class’
Last week, President Obama went on the road promoting an economic agenda for the middle class. As expected, John Boehner and other Republicans fired back by charging Obama with “squeezing the middle class.” It’s not even an election year, yet “middle class” is hotly contested linguistic real estate. But nobody […] Read more »
Why Class Warfare is Working
… We recently conducted a survey in ten competitive congressional districts in California to gain better insight into Latino voting behavior and how Republicans might appeal to this growing sector of the electorate. The most important finding in this data – and in other data we have seen – is […] Read more »
Optimism in an Era of Growing Inequality and Economic Difficulty
Despite an extended period of economic difficulty, Pew Research Center pollsters Andrew Kohut and Michael Dimock show that Americans’ core values and beliefs about economic opportunity, and the nation’s economic outlook, remain largely optimistic and unchanged. There is also little evidence that economic class is becoming a greater factor in […] Read more »
Middle-class Americans still aren’t being helped by Washington
… Guns and immigration dominate the debate in Washington— issues that are worthy of attention, but neither of which speaks directly to the issues that remain at the top of most Americans’ list of concerns, which include jobs, the economy and economic security. The political system appears frozen when it […] Read more »
The Morose Middle Class
The Middle Class is in a funk, its view of the future growing dim as fear rolls in like a storm. An Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released Thursday found that while most Americans (56 percent) hold out hope that they‘ll be in a higher class at some point, even […] Read more »