A New Insight into Donald Trump’s Rise

A 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 line

After 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.