The Middle Class Is Shrinking, Here’s Which Income Bracket It’s Shrinking Into — and It’s Not the Top.

The image seldom corresponds with the political rhetoric when you stroll through any older American suburb on a weekday afternoon. Compared to thirty years ago, the driveways are now fuller. The vehicles are larger and frequently come in pairs. The children inside are using laptops that would have cost a small fortune in 1979 to complete their homework. Nevertheless, the prevailing narrative in Washington seems to be that the middle class is crumbling due to its own weight. According to a recent report by Stephen J. Rose and Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute, the reality is more complicated and, in some ways, fascinating.

Simplified, their claim is that the middle class is actually declining. It’s not a myth. However, the families that are leaving it are not falling into poverty as Joe Biden and JD Vance have suggested for years in their own strangely similar speeches. They are progressing. From 10% of American families in 1979 to 31% in 2024, the upper-middle class—defined by the authors using absolute, inflation-adjusted thresholds rather than slippery relative ones—grew. It’s not a rounding error. A tectonic shift, that is.

Perhaps the reason it hasn’t received more attention is that it’s the kind of discovery that contradicts political talking points on both sides. Left-wing populists argue for more robust labor laws by pointing to a hollowed-out middle. The same hollowing is used by right-wing populists to defend trade barriers and tariffs. The emotional premise of both stories is that regular Americans are losing ground. The percentage of families stuck below the core middle class decreased from 54% to 35% over the same 45 years, according to AEI data.

Reading the report gives the impression that the authors foresaw the opposition. In order to explain why a relative definition, in which the middle class is always “two-thirds to double the median,” essentially ensures the appearance of stagnation, they heavily rely on methodology. According to that interpretation, the middle class would not expand at all if everyone’s income doubled tomorrow. That is precisely the method used in Pew’s frequently cited figure, which states that 51% of Americans are middle class as of 2023. It measures something different from what most people probably think it measures, but it’s not incorrect.

The lived texture of the numbers is more difficult to ignore. A worker in the late 1970s would have considered households earning between roughly $55,000 and $167,000 today—the rough Pew middle-class band—to be well-off. Smartphones, air conditioning, travel abroad, and two-income households with college degrees all became commonplace. None of that takes away from the real stress that many families experience due to childcare, healthcare, and housing expenses. There are actual pressures. However, pressure and descent are not the same thing.

It’s difficult to ignore how infrequently a political speech incorporates this kind of discovery. Voters are more moved when they are informed they have been defrauded than when they are told they are doing better than they believe. Perhaps the difference between what the data indicates and what the nation has chosen to believe about itself is the greater story here, rather than the income brackets per se. It remains to be seen if that disparity narrows or grows over the course of the upcoming election cycle.