Poor People Are America's Swing Voters

Time​ Magazine

a day ago

In January, while the world waited to see what a second Donald Trump Presidency would look like, photos from the Inauguration offered a snapshot of what was to come. Some of the wealthiest people in the world joined politicians in the Capitol rotunda to mark the beginning of the Trump regime while everyone else was locked out in the cold. Six months later, Congress passed one of the largest transfers of wealth from low-income people to the rich in history. As lawmakers go home for their August recess, the record is clear: the White House and Congress are working hand-in-hand to serve the interests of elites at the expense of everyday Americans.
On the one hand, this is the worst of times: power is concentrated in the hands of people who pray at the opening of Congress, then act to prey on the people they swore an oath to serve. But a close look at voter demographics and the failure of both Democrats and Republicans to engage poor voters in recent decades suggests that a small percentage of poor voters who understand that they are losing their health insurance, nutrition assistance, and rural hospitals because of their political leadership have the potential to upend American politics.
Over the past four decades, as inequality has grown exponentially for all Americans, the number of poor and low-income white people—66 million in 2018—has swelled higher than any other demographic. This is one reason low-income, majority white communities became susceptible to the 'populist' appeal of the MAGA movement. If white people are hurting, the divide-and-conquer myths suggests, it must be because Black people or immigrants are taking from them. By leaning into an aggressive investment in extreme ICE raids, Trump's regime has bet the farm on this myth.
But the reality of American politics is that, despite these appeals, most poor people don't vote against their own interests. While Trump improved in 2024 among low-income voters who cast a ballot in the election, new data from Lake Research Associates makes clear that the real change was in the number of poor and low-income people who decided not to vote in the race between Trump and Harris. More than 19 million 'Biden Skippers' who helped elect President Joe Biden in 2020 didn't show up in 2024. When asked why, nearly a third said their number one reason for not voting was that they didn't feel like the Democrats' message spoke to their economic situation.
When asked, these 'Biden skippers' were not disinterested in politics. Far from it, nearly half say they check the news more than once a day and the majority favor Democrats in a generic match-up. What they want is a candidate who speaks to them, commits to fight for them, and presents an economic agenda that they know would make a difference in their lives.
Poor people are not driving the extremism in American politics, nor are they the true base for Trump, whose major policy achievement has been to cut government programs that serve everyday people so he can give tax breaks to corporations and wealthy Americans. Poor and low-income Americans are, in fact, the largest swing vote in the country. We need a movement to engage poor people who haven't voted because they've never imagined the system could work for them. As they begin to feel the impact of the cuts from Trump's big ugly budget bill, poor and low-income people must organize to demand candidates who will represent them.
Movements that bring poor people together across lines of race and region can build on America's history of moral fusion movements to strengthen democracy for all of us. In our book White Poverty, we wrote about how the 2018 midterms saw a roughly 10% increase in voter participation over the previous midterms—a larger four-year-increase than Obama's record-breaking turnout in 2008. Many factors contributed to this surge in participation, but a raw number increase in low-income voters made a significant contribution to the 'blue wave' that returned control of the U.S. House to Democrats in 2018 and put a check on Trump's use of the White House to reward elite interests and undermine policies that lift poor people in 2020.
A movement can change how candidates talk and what agenda they promise to pursue when elected. Democrats need a new wave of leadership that not only articulates a vision for how government can serve everyday people, but also demonstrates that they are committed to use executive action, change courts, and use power when they are in office to win policies that lift from the bottom so everyone can rise.
If a moral fusion movement, led by poor and low-income people, can rise up in America today, we have the numbers to change the political conversation. This is why we have organized Moral Mondays across the South to go to the districts that will be hurt first and worst by cuts to healthcare and organize people who will be directly impacted to speak directly to their representatives with clergy and moral leaders by their side. A movement led by these people, linking arms across racial lines and joining hands with progressive allies, could not only decide the Presidential elections, but many Congressional and other statewide races as well.
Poor and low-income people make up a third of the U.S. electorate—more than 40% of the electorate in the swing states that will decide the 2026 midterms. It's time for poor people of every race to reject the myths that have been used to divide us and come together to demand an economy that works for all of us. Such a movement isn't only good news for the poor. It's the best hope for American democracy.
Adapted from White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, by William J. Barber with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (Liveright), out in paperback August 5, 2025.