Many Americans say that their financial situation has stayed about the same since President Donald Trump took office, according to a new Bankrate survey, even as a pandemic-induced recession put the most workers out of a job since the Great Depression.
But some Americans don’t have optimism for the future. Roughly 1 in 4 individuals (or 26 percent) expect that their finances will be better a year from now. Meanwhile, many Americans are split over which presidential ticket will be better for their wallet.
Bankrate commissioned YouGov Plc to conduct this online poll from Aug. 19-21, with a total sample size of 2,418 adults. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all U.S. adults.
Key takeaways:
- About 2 in 5 Americans say their finances have stayed the same since Trump’s inauguration.
- Americans are split on whether a Biden or Trump ticket will be better for their financial situation.
- Even with a high-stakes election, 2 in 5 see their finances faring the same about a year from now.
- 39 percent say they’re less likely to re-elect Trump after his coronavirus response.
Americans mostly say their finances have stayed the same since Trump took office
While 40 percent of Americans in Bankrate’s poll said their finances have stayed the same over the course of Trump’s term, 1 in 4 said their finances have gotten worse and 26 percent report improvement. About 8 percent said they didn’t know how to rate their situation over the past three and a half years.
But not all groups share that prosperity. White respondents were nearly two times as likely as Black respondents (31 percent vs. 16 percent) to report that their finances have gotten better since Trump took office. Meanwhile, individuals making more than $80,000 annually disproportionately reported that their finances have improved (41 percent) under the Trump administration, compared with 19 percent of those earning less than $30,000.
It highlights the unequal distribution of wealth that burdened the longest expansion on record long before the coronavirus pandemic. That divide has only widened, with moderate- to low-income communities bearing the brunt of the pain as lower-wage jobs vanished while the U.S. economy shut down to control the spread of the virus.
“One of many unique aspects to the current economic environment is the wide division between the haves and the have-nots,” says Mark Hamrick, Bankrate senior economic analyst and Washington bureau chief. “Those able to work from home and have avoided the loss of a job or income have been relatively unscathed, at least financially. At the same time, unemployment remains historically elevated, and the path of the economic recovery remains uncertain.”
