In 2016, Trump’s first electoral victory came alongside a peculiar, controversial narrative: that “economic anxiety” explained the support of white “working-class” voters for Trump. It returned after the 2020 election, when supporters of Trump stormed the Capitol in order to prevent turnover of power and again in 2023 as the Republican Party geared up for primary season.

A number of problems with this explanation for Trump’s appeal emerged immediately. The “white” part of the working-class economic anxiety narrative, whether implied or explicit, provoked ire: white working-class voters made up 35 percent of Trump’s largely affluent winning coalition in the 2016 primary, and a sizable chunk of that demographic did not buy what Trump was selling. Meanwhile, working-class Black voters reliably voted Democratic in the 2016 election, just as they had for decades. Studies conducted after that election failed to find robust links between financial hardship and voting for Trump — in fact, Trump’s supporters in general skewed higher income.

But perhaps something has changed. Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory featured a more multiracial and reportedly working-class voting coalition than the Republicans have put together since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Is there something to the economic anxiety narrative after all? And if so, what does it mean for the political path forward?

There’s certainly something to economic anxiety. To put it in a global perspective, journalist John Burn-Murdoch noted that every single incumbent party in the “developed world” hemorrhaged votes in 2024 — downstream, he argues, of economic and geopolitical conditions like inflation and the great power war in Ukraine that present “arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians.” From this vantage point, what is surprising is that Democrats lost so few votes, rather than so many, as they outperformed their developed-world counterparts.

Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini tweeted a graphic based on the AP VoteCast survey alleging that the changes in vote share over the most recent U.S. presidential elections evidenced a “security gap,” with less secure groups like Black and nonwhite, non-college-educated men shifting toward the Republican Party. As Nathan Tankus chronicles, a host of Covid-era social protections — eviction bans, Medicaid expansion, and student loan payment pauses — were either eliminated or allowed to expire in the years following 2021, which had a disproportionate effect on the lowest-income Americans.

The problem with the “economic anxiety” narrative was never the explicit, even self-evident, part of its case: of course voting trends and political behavior strongly correlate to people’s actual, felt, and expected ability to meet their basic needs and provide for those they care for. It would be stunning and surprising if political behavior didn’t respond to this reality — the concrete needs that the abstraction of “the economy” meets, however imperfectly and unequally.

The problem, in contrast, was the implicit aspect of the narrative: the idea that explaining voters’ behavior via economic anxiety rendered other explanations unnecessary, particularly those that highlight the role of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia and the machinations of political actors who stoke and exploit these attitudes. This has never made much sense. Voters’ expectations of their economic prospects are measurably affected by political outcomes: after Trump’s election in 2016, white economic anxiety “evaporated,” while African Americans’ anxiety climbed to its highest level since 2000. One potential explanation for this kind of shift: zero-sum beliefs about which social groups will be protected economically based on who is in power, with white voters more optimistic about their fates under Republican leadership and Black voters more optimistic about Democratic leadership.

The portrayal of economic anxiety as a standalone rather than complementary explanation to the machinations of plutocratic bigots also flies in the face of what we know about the actual campaigns whose job it was to appeal to voters. The Trump campaign abetted and benefited from not only the misogyny and racism of its own strategists and campaigns but also the broader cultural toxicity incubated by outlets like Gab and Truth Social; the latter’s majority shareholder is President-elect Trump. As Taylor Jo Isenberg, executive director of the Economic Security Project, explains it: “Trump exploited the very real economic anxieties many Americans feel, and he directed that fear towards refugees, immigrants, transgender individuals, and other marginalized communities. It is an intentional choice to pull on the threads that hold our democracy together and unravel them to serve his own interests.”

As soon as we are prepared to accept that it might be easier to win on political messages like “Immigrants took your job” when many people are out of work or underemployed, we are already in a position to see the false choice we’re being offered between economic and cultural explanations. The one helps to explain the other.

The false narrative of economic anxiety as the sole cause of the country’s rightward turn fits into a larger one, with Democratic Party insiders blaming “identity politics” for the party’s losses, politically meaningless distractions from real kitchen-table issues. But debunking or fact checking — giving people nothing more than a better story about why they are economically insecure — won’t be enough to counter this narrative. It remains effective in part because the economic insecurity is real and inadequately addressed by the political status quo.

The critical work, then, lies in building power for people to secure their affordable housing, food, and dignity via a path that does not flow through an authoritarian strongman or the scapegoating of women, minorities, or immigrants. And that trail will be blazed as it always has been: by workers’ unions, tenants’ unions, debtors’ unions, and similar groups. These efforts don’t deny identity for some abstract, theoretical universalism but rather are rooted in the real universalism of connecting people across cultural and racial differences through concrete political projects with defined goals. The answer to economic anxiety is not even more moaning about coastal elites or “wokeness”: it is durable political power built on solidarity rather than predation. The only route to true security for all — for a world that doesn’t toss aside common public interests in order to protect the narrow private interests of politicians or shareholders — is the solidaristic protection of all by all.