A recent paper by Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup, based on 87,428 interviews conducted by the organization between July 2015 and July 2016, showed this seemingly surprising finding: Support for Mr. Trump wasn’t strongly related to income and employment. In fact, among whites with similar educational levels, those who held favorable views of Mr. Trump had higher incomes and were no more likely to be out of the work force than those who held unfavorable views of him.
But that doesn’t mean that economic distress is irrelevant to Trump’s supporters. Rather, the interviews show that people’s satisfaction with their standard of living, and their subsequent political choices, depends on more than how many dollars they bring home each week. Their happiness depends on their reference group: whom are they comparing themselves to?
People often compare their standard of living with the standard they experienced while growing up. The most dissatisfied individuals tend to be the ones who don’t think they have matched or exceeded their parents’ economic standing. One might fault them for their narrow focus on their own kin, but they have merely bought into the American idea of progress — which implies that every generation should have a better life than the previous one — and found their own situation wanting. Typical survey measures of income and employment don’t capture the influence of these glances back in time.
This principle suggests that we should expect greater support for Mr. Trump among the downwardly mobile — those who believe that they aren’t doing as well as the previous generation — even if their incomes aren’t that low.
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Andrew Cherlin, The Downwardly Mobile for Trump
Trump’s attracted the downwardly mobile and the immobile: those who perceive themselves as not surpassing their parents’ levels of economic status.
I remember reading a few years ago that people think they’ve been successful if they exceed their parent’s income by 30%. This is a foundationaly self-assessment that Trump has tapped into.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/149461780337
