Buffalo, New York. Erie, Pennsylvania. Youngstown, Ohio. These and many other majority middle-class counties voted for Barack Obama in 2008, paving his path to the White House. In 2016, a majority of them flipped for Donald Trump.
That was among the crucial reasons the GOP prevailed in this election, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. In it, researchers looked at the past voting patterns of metro areas where at least 55 percent of the population lived in middle-income households in 2014. (A household of three members was middle-income in 2014, if it brought in between $42,000 to $125,000 a year. The share of Americans that live in such households nationwide is 51 percent.)
