WOW.

Working class wage gains surpassed upper income wage gains between 2017–2019 for the first time since the late-1990s, a fact not lost on members of the working class who happen to be African American and Hispanic. According to a University of Colorado study published in 2020, during the first three years of the Trump Presidency, about 380,000 African Americans exited poverty, compared to 80,000 during the Obama era. More than half-a-million Hispanics moved up the economic ladder past the poverty line in each of the three years of Trump/Pence, compared to only 150,000 for the Obama/Biden era.

This economic growth and its distribution among the labor market is not happenstance. It’s no accident that the trade, immigration, and environmental policy reversals made by Trump from those of the Obama administration coincided with both the lowest unemployment levels and lowest poverty rates for African Americans in history in 2019, at 5.5 percent, and 18.8 percent, respectively

And in the Midwest, the historical base of industry in the US, one in three black men voted for Trump, according to an NBC Exit Poll taken on November 3rd.

You shouldn't be hiding this article as a comment. Mystery of the steady approval rating solved? Certainly explains it for me. So many "approve of the job Trump is doing" respondents to pollsters and reporters and the like would say things like they wish he would quit tweeting, but they liked what he was doing as president.

edit to add: and yes, it's worldwide

Countries that have seen the most dramatic growth in political populism—France, the United States—are places where the manufacturing base has fallen the most. Economies like Germany and South Korea, where fewer manufacturing jobs have been lost, have not seen this uptick in populist unrest.

It turns out that “environmental-regulation privilege”—the kind that people unknowingly benefit from by working in parts of the economy least affected by environmental regulation, like the New Economy of digital technology—exists. And those who don’t have it—wage workers in fly-over Red States and up and down the Mid-Atlantic, New England, and California—suffer the consequences.