Since replacing her boss atop the 2024 Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris has cast herself as an agent of generational change who would open "a new way forward" for the American people. But even if a younger and undeniably more sprightly figure is now bearing the party's message, political observers and voters may feel that message is oddly familiar, reviving an old conception that's been stored in the political attic for the last eight years.
In Joe Biden's acceptance speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, he uttered the phrase "middle class" just once. When it was Harris' turn to accept the nomination this August, she used it nine times.
"We are charting a new way forward. Forward — to a future with a strong and growing middle class," she declared halfway through her address, later promising that expanding that vaguely-defined group in the socioeconomic center ground would be the "defining goal" of her presidency.
Harris has continued to use that refrain on the campaign trail: The middle class is "one of America's greatest strengths," she says. As president, she will be "laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class." According to her own autobiographical narrative, she knows what she's talking about: "I come from the middle class." (It's debatable whether other Americans would define the child of two Berkeley academics that way, but never mind.)
It's as if her speeches were pulled from the days of flip-phones and jeans under dresses and Chuck Schumer's 2006 book In his dissertation about how to position Democrats for long-lasting majority rule, the current Senate majority leader urged the adoption of policies that would purportedly strengthen the middle class, and in so doing cement a bond between them and the Democratic Party. At the time, Schumer cautioned that he was not proposing a "focus on the middle class exclusively," but rather a winning coalition that already included union labor, college-educated liberals and minorities of all socioeconomic backgrounds.
Barack Obama took the middle-class approach to heart, using the term "middle-class economics" to define his domestic agenda. But by 2016, many public intellectuals were criticizing the Democratic Party for abandoning its traditional coalition for the single-minded pursuit of middle-class voters, thereby giving Donald Trump an opening to seize the White House with a surge of white working-class support. Worse yet, some observers accused leading Democrats of cynically using the "middle class" as a palatable cover for neoliberal, corporate-friendly politics that worsened inequality and aimed to preserve the status quo rather than challenge it.
"The Democratic Party once represented the working class," wrote former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, one of the more progressive figures of Bill Clinton's administration, in a Guardian op-ed. "But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in 'swing' suburbs."
The "upper middle-class" label invoked by Reich is an effort to crawl out of the conceptual and terminological morass: Who or what is the middle class, exactly, and how useful is it to split that up into the "upper" or "lower" or "Black" or "suburban" middle classes to suit a particular point? One common definition is based on wealth, especially income. The Social Services Administration does not provide an official definition, but a 2014 analysis on its website suggested that the middle class encompasses the three middle quintiles of national income distribution. In 2022, the Pew Research Center released a calculator that allowed users to determine whether they were part of the middle class, based on income and local cost of living. According to the center's analysis, middle-income households encompassed half of U.S. adults and had incomes ranging from $56,600 to $169,800.
But income is not the only possible entrance exam for middle-class status. The Brookings Institution compiled an exhaustive list of ways in which studies have defined that group, including direct wealth indicators such as distance from poverty and purchasing power, as well as other markers like education level and occupation. Experts generally agree that the occupations held by middle-class earners center on salaried office professions like K-12 teachers and human resources specialists or high-skill technical labor. At the same time, they're not quite sure how to account for such complications as households with two different wage earners or jobs that may have high prestige value relative to their compensation (or the other way around).
Furthermore, the wealth-centric model fails to account for a given occupation's power over workers, or for possession of capital. While high incomes often correspond to power in a workplace, that's not universally true: A small business owner might earn less than a data engineer, but the engineer's salary and working conditions are in the hands of his supervisors, while the business owner, like a mini-CEO, controls the fates of his workers. In this sense, the engineer has more in common with employees at the small business, who are selling their labor for a wage.
A mid-level manager, the kind of job often considered emblematic of a middle-class career, stands between those two roles, answering to a CEO but also holding delegated authority over who to promote, fire, praise or abuse.
"By looking only at income or lifestyle, we see the results of class, but not the origins of class," writes economist Michael Zweig in his 2011 book "The Working Class Majority." "We see how we are different in our possessions, but not how we are related and connected, and made different, in the process of making what we possess." In other words, the power to create wealth and impose poverty determines class, not those values themselves. By that definition, Zweig says, more than 63% of Americans can be considered working class while only 35% are middle class.
Other analyses point to the nature of compensation, differentiating middle-class salary earners who receive regular paychecks from working-class laborers who are paid by the hour and may experience long stretches of unemployment. To further complicate matters, a report issued by the Department of Commerce in 2010 for then-Vice President Joe Biden's "Middle Class Taskforce," defined the middle class by its collective "aspirations" above all else:
Middle class families and those who wish to be middle class have certain common aspirations for themselves and their children. They strive for economic stability and therefore desire to own a home and to save for retirement. They want economic opportunities for their children and therefore want to provide them with a college education. Middle class families want to protect their own and their children’s health. And they want enough income for each adult to have a car and for a family vacation each year. Middle class families are forward-looking, and they know that to achieve these goals, they must work hard, plan ahead and save for the future. Indeed, being middle class may be as much about setting goals and working to achieve them as it is about their attainment.
Taken together, all these attitudes, numbers and contexts offer a blurry explanation as to why the middle class is an ideal to which politicians believe most Americans aspire. Middle-class status is associated with material stability, an especially appealing prospect when medical bills, groceries, gas and other necessities are not affordable for many working-class Americans. It can clearly be gratifying for a successful earner to achieve economic security, knowing or believing that it was the result of their ambition and work ethic. In modern capitalist societies, an occupation associated with high income and the symbols that money can buy, like a suburban single-family home or an annual summer vacation, creates an aura of respectability and even virtue. In the slightly outdated parlance of our country, that's the American Dream.
Indeed, the middle class as a concept has become deeply ingrained into what it means to be American. The revolution of 1776 emerged in part from a rejection of the feudal class divisions that existed in Europe, and European thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, seeing a place where such divisions had vanished, wrote that people in America were "seen to be more equal in fortune and intelligence — more equally strong, in other words — than they were in any other country, or were at any other time in recorded history."
Although a middle class already existed throughout most of Europe by that time, in the form of urban bourgeoisie or yeoman-farmers or some other grouping, the concept gained special significance in a new country whose Constitution eliminated the aristocratic privileges enjoyed by European nobility. In America, the middle class, not the aristocracy, exemplified the national spirit, though the phrase "middle class" was not widely used until the later 19th century. That attitude is still carried today by politicians like Bill Clinton, who described middle-class Americans as people who "work hard and play by the rules," and Harris, who bestowed them with a flattering honorific: "the engine of America's prosperity."
But if most legal distinctions between classes in America were officially banished in 1789 — among white people, that is — considerable inequality of wealth and capital not only remained, but increased and hardened in place. Class consciousness has largely remained dormant in America, in large part because most people consider themselves to belong to the same amorphous socioeconomic class. The powerful desire of most Americans to claim membership in the "respectable" class — and the corresponding desire among the rich Americans to underestimate their wealth and privilege — has meant that the boundaries of middle-class-ness have been stretched ever further in both directions. In recent decades, experts have sought to define the "lower-middle" and "upper-middle" class, underscoring the reality of socioeconomic divisions while maintaining the illusion that the American middle class can somehow be considered a coherent group.
In a 2013 Atlantic article, communications expert Anat Shenker-Osorio explains "middle class" as a sort of universal negative category: "Not finding popular depictions of wealth and poverty similar to our own lived experiences, we determine we must be whatever’s left over."
This lack of precision or definition makes for a great muddle of a category, but also an opportunity for politicians to appeal to a group of voters that may include somewhere between one-half to three-quarters of all Americans. Rhetoric and policies supposedly targeting the middle class tends to crowd out discussions about poverty, wealth redistribution, racism or the exploitation of workers — issues that risk exposing schisms or fractures within the middle class itself and are often dismissed as risky and divisive. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns were so notable — and so threatening to the Democratic Party establishment — precisely because he spoke directly to those issues. (To be fair to both Biden and Obama, they have also done so, although less consistently.)
When Gallup first asked Americans to identify their social class in a 2000 survey, 63 percent identified as upper-middle or middle class ("lower-middle" was not included). Then came the economic crisis of the late 2000s and its aftermath, when experts raised alarms about worsening inequality and the disappearance of the middle class. Home ownership, the traditional emblem of middle-class prosperity, collapsed on a grand scale, and some Americans began to realize that maybe they weren't middle class after all. In a 2024 Gallup poll, just over half of respondents identified themselves as such.
"These readings are generally in line with those since the Great Recession," read the Gallup analysis. "Before then, Americans were typically more likely to self-identify as members of the middle or upper-middle class and less likely to say they belonged to the working or lower class."
Class issues that reached beyond this nebulous framework began to seep into political discourse. When Obama proposed increasing taxes on the richest Americans, Republicans decried his plans as "class warfare" against virtuous high-earners, although that argument didn't seem to pay off and was soon abandoned. Then came a surge of Occupy Wall Street protests denouncing corporate greed and inequality from the left, while on the right, the Tea Party movement held the "welfare state" and "big government" responsible for the country's economic woes.
Out of this angry ferment came two very different expressions of anti-establishment politics. On the left, Sanders' out-of-nowhere 2016 campaign spoke directly for the emancipation of working-class Americans from corporate exploitation. On the right came a wealthy real estate baron who blamed immigrants, the "deep state" and other insidious actors for America's decline.
Donald Trump promised to improve the lives of working-class Americans while rarely, if ever, using the term. Unsurprisingly, that didn't happen; he appointed union-busters to the National Labor Relations Board and signed a tax cut that primarily benefited the country's wealthiest earners. Sanders never became president but urged Biden, with some success, to assemble one of the more pro-worker administrations in modern American history. Working-class voters have, without question, rallied to the GOP in increasing numbers over the last decade-plus, but Democrats hold out eternal hope that the trend can be reversed.
Harris and Biden are highly similar in their political messaging about Trump, characterizing the GOP nominee as a dangerous and unhinged fascist. But while Biden often seems to draw from economic populism and pro-union rhetoric as well as more "moderate" Democratic talking points at the same time, Harris has pivoted firmly back toward middle-class politics, framing her policy plans as prescriptions to control the cost of living, improve health care access and enable first-time homebuyers. Her goal, she has repeatedly declared, is not just to stabilize the middle class but expand it, giving Americans who are living on the margins the opportunity to share in the prosperity.
Harris has sometimes echoed the Biden administration's more aggressive (and highly popular) attacks on corporate power, but a certain calculus seems involved: She has criticized price gouging and other practices that affect consumers directly, but has shied away, for instance, from broader antitrust actions that don't fit as easily within her middle-of-the-road message. With the presidential campaign in its last days and Harris locked in a dead heat with Trump, progressives may wonder whether she is dramatically misreading which voters she needs to win, and what they really want.
