By Tim Ryan
President Biden is touting the strength of America’s post-pandemic economic recovery, and he’s right: Wages are up, unemployment is down, and inflation is finally coming under control. But as pollsters perpetually point out, the president is not getting credit in the polls. Working-class voters—particularly young people in middle American communities like those I represented in northeast Ohio—are particularly despondent. The anger isn’t new—its roots run to before even the Great Recession. But the $10,000 question is why President’s Biden’s success hasn’t yet won over middle America’s minds and hearts?
The problem stems primarily from the way we understand voter attitudes. The old question—”Are you better off than you were four years ago?”—simply doesn’t apply anymore. That’s because working class voters are more focused on the reality that they’re so much worse off than their parents and grandparents were at the same age. Many young people have come to embrace “financial nihilism“: The prospect of upward mobility is so remote and the chance of achieving the American Dream so far-fetched that the tools previous generations used to lever up their prospects appear nothing less than preposterous. To young people, it feels like it’s better to invest in crypto or make parlay bets on FanDuel than try to take advantage of Pell Grants and 401ks that aren’t sufficient to their financial challenges.
These aren’t problems any president would be able to solve in a single term—because the underlying challenges have developed over decades. Through the last quarter century, housing supply has been so severely constricted that starter homes are now out of reach for young people wanting to put down roots. When the Boomers turned 25, their generation had garnered 20 percent of the nation’s household wealth—the Millennials, by contrast, boast only 5 percent. For that reason, the nation’s young working class simply can’t maintain their place on the socio-economic ladder, let alone climb it. And they’re reacting, understandably, with a combination of rage and disaffection.
