- VP candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz are both trying to target middle-class voters.
- But the middle class itself is a loosely defined demographic — more of an identity.
- Despite varied definitions, many Americans want to identify as middle class for its positive connotations.
It's a middle-class-off in the 2024 election, as both prospective vice presidential candidates square off to appeal to that oh-so-important demographic.
For most of US electoral history, candidates have tried to win over voters by appealing to the middle class, which at various times has included everyone from farmers squeezing by to lawyers with plenty to spend but not enough to retire. President Joe Biden has described himself as the "poorest person" in Congress and "Middle-Class Joe," even though he and his wife, Jill, earned over $15 million between leaving the vice presidency in 2017 and becoming president.
Campaign teams for both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have also employed this strategy. Both Trump's VP pick, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, and Harris' pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have leaned heavily into their middle-class personas on the national stage.
At a July Wisconsin rally, Harris noted, "We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead." She outlined proposals for helping middle-class families, including lowering childcare costs, student loan forgiveness, and tax credits.
Harris has rallied behind Walz's background growing up in rural Nebraska, serving in the military, and working as a high school teacher and coach. According to his 2023 tax returns, Walz and his wife had a total income of about $299,000, relatively modest for a politician with a national profile. Walz's comparably low net wealth has drawn praise and criticism from Americans.
Vance, a Marine veteran, wrote the memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," which documents going up in Ohio and Kentucky in a family struggling to put food on the table. Vance, who worked as a venture capitalist, recently criticized Harris for wearing expensive jewelry. Vance, backed by Silicon Valley billionaires such as Peter Thiel, and his wife listed between $4.4 million to $11.5 million in assets in 2022, The New York Times reported.
There's just one problem: The middle class they're trying to cater to doesn't really exist.
Of course, many Americans earn somewhere in the middle band of incomes. But as much as the middle class is discussed, there isn't any official or well-defined economic idea of what being middle class means.
"Class is a very strange concept, especially in the US," Jeffrey Wenger, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, told BI. "We're not a very class-conscious people in general, so we have very loose conceptions of what it means to be a class and the kinds of consumption behaviors, attitudes, and all of the other things that come along with notions of class."
Despite not having well-defined boundaries, Americans historically like to identify themselves as being in the middle class. Gallup data suggests that in 2024, only 2% of Americans consider themselves upper class, while only 12% think they're lower class. Meanwhile, 54% say they're upper-middle or middle class, while 31% identify as working class.
That can likely be chalked up, in part, to the neutrality and connotation of the label — middle-class evokes a hard worker, but not one who has fallen into poverty or earns exorbitant amounts of money.
"For the poor, they aspire to be middle class because that's the norm, and for the wealthy, they don't want to be seen as the robber barons and the targets of 'tax the rich,'" Wenger said.
Who is middle class in America?
The simplest way to measure the middle class is to take the middle 50% of the national income distribution. The problem with this, Wenger said, is that you can't determine if the middle class is shrinking or growing, as it will always be 50%.
Pew Research Center defines middle-income earners as Americans making between two-thirds to double the median income for their family size; that group has been shrinking, as BI reported, with more Americans rising into the upper class by that definition.
Pew found that the share of middle-class Americans fell from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023. In 2023, 19% of Americans are upper-income, while 30% are lower-income. But despite more formerly middle class Americans being better off today, many wouldn't identify as upper class.
"If you talk to all the people who earn two times the median income, which is about $150,000 today in the US economy, most would not say that they're wealthy or upper class," Wenger said.
That's partially because this measurement depends on what your income can buy, Wenger added. A family making $75,000 a year in Kansas will be more comfortable financially than an identical family in San Francisco. Plus, homeownership, insurance, and access to education have all gotten more out of reach for those who might qualify as middle class on income alone.
"The three big things that help stabilize middle-class families in terms of their consumption have all gotten a lot more expensive relative to median incomes," Wenger said.
To better define the middle class based on the lifestyle it can afford, Wenger and his colleagues developed a consumption-based measure. They found that just 55% of people considered middle-class based on income are also middle-class according to their consumption measurement. The model analyzes the percentage of after-tax household income that goes toward necessity spending, including "food, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, transportation, personal care, and apparel." Middle-class households spend 40% to 90% of their income on necessities.
Another measure of the middle class is more qualitative, pegged to their role in society or their economic aspirations. Some consider themselves middle-class if they own a modest home, have enough to care for their children, or take vacations every now and then.
Some workers consider themselves middle-class if they work in middle-skilled jobs, often characterized by clerical tasks. They could be members of what researchers Barbara and John Ehrenreich termed the "professional-managerial class": Knowledge workers on salary who spend their days producing mental work in places like universities or digital media.
They are distinct from working-class, blue-collar workers — yet, as Ehrenreich argued, the fate that befell the blue-collar workers who had jobs shipped away and union benefits dissipate has now inflicted the professional class. In fact, the turntables are tilting back toward America's blue-collar workers, who might have more of a claim to the middle-class moniker than they have in the past five decades.
Some middle-class Americans are struggling to get by
Even the federal government's take on who should be eligible for different forms of social assistance belies a misunderstanding of what salary makes Americans economically comfortable. Fewer Americans live in the official definition of poverty, but more are increasingly joining the ranks of ALICE — meaning that they're asset-limited, income-constrained, but employed. Those are Americans who make too much money to qualify for social benefits — and might even fall within the income constraints of middle-income — but still aren't getting by.
Because many older Americans don't have stable income aside from Social Security or pensions, they may be considered lower-class based on strict income-based measurements. However, their consumption habits may suggest that they are indeed middle-class. Still, many older Americans are worried about not being able to retire.
By all of those not-so-definitive measures, Walz and Vance both might have a legitimate claim to being middle-class — even if that doesn't really mean anything. But their broader messaging to that ill-defined cohort is part of a long, storied political history.
"Appealing to the interests of the American middle class has long been a go-to strategy for politicians looking for votes or ways to boost their popularity, so we shouldn't find it surprising that both vice-presidential candidates are doing it," Lawrence R. Samuel, the author of the book "The American Middle Class: A Cultural History," told BI in an email. "Beyond drawing in citizens from both ends of the financial spectrum (even most rich and poor Americans consider themselves "middle class"), the term is linguistic currency for a host of positive values."
Do you consider yourself middle class? Contact these reporters at [email protected] and [email protected].