Harris and Trump want to strengthen the middle class. It could use the help

CNN —

As soon as Vice President Kamala Harris hit the campaign trail this week, she made it clear what one of her top priorities would be if she wins the presidential election in November.

“Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” she said at a Wisconsin rally on Tuesday. “Because here’s the thing we all here (in) Wisconsin know: When our middle class is strong, America is strong.”

Similarly, former PresidentDonald Trump has also promised to help the middle class, which he says has been hurt by the steep rise in prices in recent years.

“Under Biden and the radical left Democrats, inflation is wiping out our middle class,” he said at a Michigan rally last weekend.

Harris and Trump, like many political candidates starting with Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election, are targeting the middle class in part because it captures a broad swath of the nation. There’s no hard-and-fast definition of the middle class; it’s more about self-identification. And just over half of Americans consider themselves middle class, according to a recent Gallup poll.

The group’s amorphousness also makes it hard to campaign on targeted policies and then live up to those promises in office, said David Roediger, an American studies professor at the University of Kansas and author of “The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right.”

“When you have a group of people that’s so ill-defined and so heterogeneous, it’s hard to know what the policy outcomes would be,” he said.

Helping the middle class

Both Harris and Trump have made big – but very general – promises to aid the middle class, as well as those who consider themselves working class, who make up