Middle class feels great again, more feel they belong

According to new survey work, many more Americans feel that they are now part of the middle and upper-middle class, not the working or lower class.

Gallup found an increase from 50 percent when President Obama was reelected to 58 percent today of those who feel they belong to the middle class. On the other end, just 38 percent now say they are in the working, or lower class.

And they have space to grow. During the Bush administration, an average of 61 percent felt they were middle class.

It comes after several reports that the middle class was dying. Many of those voters chose Donald Trump in the election after he made his focus jobs and his campaign theme “Make America Great Again.”

Said Gallup: “Americans’ self-identified social class does not necessarily reflect their actual socioeconomic status because in responding to the question, Americans can choose to place themselves in any category they want. However, there is a strong relationship between respondents’ self-reported income and their self-placement on the social class spectrum. Americans are two to three times more likely to identify as upper-middle or middle class if they report a household income of at least $75,000 than they are if their income is under $30,000, based on aggregated data across the three time periods.”

The analysis was of a handful or polls and found growth of self-identified middle classers continuing since 2012 and not directly the result of the election.

“The uptick this fall, across three separate surveys, could reflect many factors. The rise was not confined to just one partisan group and was not a direct result of the election of Donald Trump. Perhaps most importantly, middle-class household incomes rose last year, and the shift from lower- and working-class to middle-class identification could reflect these real-world circumstances,” said Gallup.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]