Most Americans think Trump is failing the middle class

Most Americans, including many white voters without college degrees, think the Trump administration isn’t doing enough to help the middle class — a worrying finding for the GOP ahead of November’s midterms.

The new poll released Tuesday by Quinnipiac University found that a majority of Americans dislike Trump’s policies and disapprove of how he’s performing as president. And 48 percent of those polled strongly disapproved of Trump’s efforts so far.

A majority of those polled — 58 percent — believe that the Trump administration isn’t doing enough to help middle-class Americans. That includes women and nonwhite voters — 87 percent of black voters polled think that the administration isn’t helping middle-class Americans.

That’s true even of white voters without college degrees, a group that overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016. Those voters were closely split on whether Trump is doing enough for the middle class: 49 percent say he is not, while 46 percent say he is. (The remaining 5 percent said they didn’t know.) The poll has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

The only two groups who think Trump is doing enough for the middle class are Republicans and white men, according to the poll.

The polling on views of Trump and the Trump administration follows a survey performed in July that showed 54 percent of voters across 48 GOP-controlled congressional districts said Republicans are “more corrupt” than Democrats — a message the Democratic National Committee is taking into the midterms, as I wrote in July:

Democrats are making anti-corruption part of their midterm messaging, adding an anti-corruption plank to the party’s “A Better Deal” proposal announced in February and arguing for improved ethics legislation on the basis of continued corrupt behavior in government ... As Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in May during a press briefing to announce the anti-corruption push, “Instead of delivering on his promise to drain the swamp, President Trump has become the swamp. Republicans, the White House, and the Congress are cravenly beholden to big money interests, and the American people are paying the price.”

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