Dr Lorenz Meister , Postdoctoral Researcher in Inequality, Social Policy and Social Mobility in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention , argues that President Trump's coalition was built on the fading American Dream, that this week's results show the potency of pocketbook voting, and that by siding with the AI industry the president has turned that resentment against his own party.
Americans voted with their wallets this week, not based on their identities.
Democrats have taken back both the House of Representatives and the Senate , and at least six states elected a Democratic senator for the first time in more than a decade. Midterms are the clearest verdict voters deliver on a sitting president, and they decide whether Congress obeys him or blocks him. The verdict on President Trump's second term was driven by grocery bills, fuel prices and electricity rates. It was not a referendum on who Americans are, but on whether they can afford to live .
"Trump's rise was never only a culture war. It was a revolt against an American Dream that has become ever more elusive for voters."
In my research , I combine original survey data from 6,600 US residents with social mobility data from Raj Chetty's Opportunity Insights lab at Harvard - and show that Trump's gains over his Republican predecessor Mitt Romney in 2016 were largest in places where children born poor are least likely to reach the top of the national income distribution. Because the comparison is within the same counties over time, place-based partisan leanings cannot explain it.
Instead, concerns about fairness, not only material hardship, were the main drivers behind Trump's rise. People in those places describe success, in their own words, as a matter of luck and connections rather than effort. The suspicion is not groundless: at America's most selective colleges, children from the richest one per cent are more than twice as likely to attend as middle-class applicants with the same test scores. Populism, the belief that ordinary people are being cheated by a corrupt elite, is what dissatisfaction with social mobility turns into when it is politicised.
I show how disbelief in the American Dream - that effort yields upward mobility - is closely connected to anger at elites, adding to studies on disappointed status expectations and downward mobility . The typical male worker without a college degree watched his ladder being pulled up: manufacturing jobs lost to competition with China , the end of his monopoly on the family wage as women entered the workforce , and an energy transition that threatened the coal and oil towns where his pay was highest . Each economic loss became a story about cultural enemies: Beijing, feminism, climate politics.
Identity politics was less the cause of that anger than the language through which it was expressed. And President Trump proved to be most skilful in projecting economic pain onto cultural grievances. That is why his coalition could absorb so much of it: tariffs that raised prices , cuts to welfare and tax cuts tilted to the rich .
The pocketbook strikes back
This year the pocketbook spoke directly. The war with Iran is in its ninth month and has kept inflation above three per cent . Petrol costs about $4.20 a gallon , nearly 40 per cent more than a year ago and the highest ever on an election day, under a president who promised fuel at $2 . Trump called the rise " a little glitch ". Voters disagreed. The questions that decided this election are simple: will I keep my job, and will my pay keep up with prices?
Rapid economic transformation through AI fuels both concerns. Nowhere does the confluence of pocketbook concerns and populism crystallise more clearly than over the data centre debate. AI needs vast new facilities, and they are being built in ordinary communities, where they are visible and hungry for power. Household electricity prices have risen more than ten per cent since 2024 , fastest in the battlegrounds of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania - states where Democrats saw important victories during the midterms. The richest companies on earth arrive next door, a handful of permanent jobs follow, and the neighbours pay.
The backlash is non-partisan, and voters seem to trust Democrats more on the issue. Nearly two thirds of voters oppose a data centre within ten miles of their home, and the opposition spans left and right. In September the House voted 417 to 3 for a measure pushing regulators to make large data centres pay their own grid costs.
The populist sides with the elite
On AI, Trump has taken the side of the elite. Ten years ago, he won office promising to shield American workers from globalisation. Now, he champions an unregulated AI transformation, has signed an executive order to stop states regulating it, and shows little patience for the fear, shared by seven in ten Americans , that AI will destroy jobs. When communities objected to data centres, he wrote on Truth Social that they " want to end up being backwards and poor ".
President Trump has always governed for the rich, but he always had an elite enemy to point at. On AI he has none. The tech bosses stand beside him, and siding with them touches the populist nerve. Even among his own MAGA supporters, more oppose a data centre near their home than support one , and his followers on Truth Social told him so .
Populist voters are starting to turn against the most powerful populist.
AI threatens the American Dream at its weakest point: the first rung of the proverbial ladder. Plumbers, electricians and builders are largely safe for now. The jobs at risk are the skilled entry-level ones in offices, law firms and software, the very jobs a worker's children were supposed to climb into through education. Early-career workers in the most AI-exposed occupations have already seen employment fall by 19 per cent . The Dream promises that effort and education carry you up. Remove the first rung, and the promise fails for the next generation.
My experiments show how this type of failure turns political. A single story of someone rising through connections rather than effort shifted what people believed about how success is earned, and those whose faith in effort fell furthest were also the most populist. A technology that makes effort look irrelevant is that story at national scale.
The lesson for Democrats is uncomfortable too. Economic voting is not an endorsement of their platform, but a rejection of a president whom voters associated with corruption and rising prices . It punishes whoever appears to be in charge, and the resentment it expresses is available to whoever next persuades voters that the game is rigged.
There is no informational shortcut. My experiments show that better statistics about mobility changed nothing about people's politics. Voters do not take their cue from official statistics. They take it from what they see around them. Only visible, earned opportunity rebuilds the belief that effort pays. The party that restores it will own the next decade of American politics. That is slow work, slower than any election cycle, which is why no party has yet tried.
