Americans today say they are generally optimistic about their futures, according to Gallup polling. But one group in particular -- poor white Americans -- has a shockingly dismal view of what the future holds for them. And this pessimism among poor whites goes a long way toward explaining the strange political moment we find ourselves in, one in which Donald Trump surged to the top of the Republican primary ticket by tapping into a deep vein of racial anxiety among the nation's working class.
Carol Graham, a happiness researcher at the Brookings Institution, recently analyzed Gallup's data on life satisfaction and found that when it comes to their outlook on the future, the most desperate groups are poor and near-poor whites.
Gallup asks people to rate their current lives on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst possible life they could be living and 10 is the best. Crucially, they also ask people to imagine what their lives will look like five years in the future.
Among the poor, whites are the demographic group least likely to imagine a better future for themselves, Graham found. Poor Hispanics were about 30 percent more likely to imagine a better future than poor whites. The difference for poor blacks was even larger: They were nearly three times as likely to imagine a better future than poor whites....
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