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Americans assume that the wealthy will be the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s presidency

One of the interesting aspects of the 2016 campaign was that the typical partisan split by income wasn't as apparent as in years past. Voters earning under $50,000 a year -- typically strongly Democratic -- voted for Hillary Clinton by a 12-point margin, according to exit polling. In 2012, they'd backed President Obama by 22. Those making over $100,000 annually backed Mitt Romney by 10 points five years ago. This year, they split between Clinton and Donald Trump.


The reason for this was simple: Trump's candidacy appealed more to white voters without college educations and less to whites who had college degrees. Education correlates to income, so the result was a somewhat flatter spread by income.

What's particularly interesting is that those lower-income voters who were more likely to prefer the Republican than four years ago are not particularly confident that Trump will improve their economic lot, according to new polling from Monmouth University.

Monmouth found a residual differentiation by income group in views of Trump and Obama. Lower-income Americans viewed Obama's job performance with greater approval and Trump less unfavorably than higher-income poll respondents.


(the new Washington Post-ABC News poll didn't find the same differentiation, for what it's worth.)

Where that split becomes particularly interesting was in the responses to a series of question Monmouth posed: How well did families in various economic groups fare under Obama -- and how do you think they'll fare under Trump?


Views of Obama were fairly uniform. Wealthier respondents -- those with annual incomes of $100,000 or more -- were more likely to predict that poor families would see no benefit from Trump's policies than were lower-income poll respondents. (That same group was also more likely to see some benefit to the middle class from Obama's work than those in the $50,000 to $100,000 income range.)

All three income levels, though, felt strongly that wealthy families would see a lot of benefit from Trump's policies. All three groups were more likely to say that the poor saw more benefits under Obama than did the rich. Overall, only 29 percent of respondents said that the wealthy saw a lot of benefit under Obama. More than half assume the wealthy will see a lot benefit under the new administration.

Despite the shift in the exit polls and the differences in opinions about the politicians in Monmouth's survey, assumptions about how groups did and will fare were pretty even. Trump won the presidency thanks to that shift among lower-income (mostly white) Americans, but lower-income Americans don't expect to see more benefit under Trump than they did under Obama. More than a third of those earning under $50,000 said the poor saw a lot of benefit from Obama's policies, but only 22 percent of that group expect the same from Trump.

These opinions change. In July 2013, only 20 percent of respondents said that the poor benefited a lot from Obama's policies according to a Monmouth poll. That poll predates one of the main ways Obama's policies helped lower-income families: The expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Repealing the ACA would likely eventually boot 32 million people from the ranks of the insured by 2026, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while acting as a tax break for the most wealthy.

In recent polling from Pew Research, lower-income Republicans expressed support for government-backed health insurance. Republicans are also the group least likely to think that Trump's policies will benefit the wealthy a lot; only a third of that group thinks that's the case. Nearly 9-in-10 Republicans think that poor families will see some benefit from the new president's policies.

That new Post-ABC poll asked voters if they supported repealing Obamacare. More than three-quarters of Republicans did.

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