Now, more than half of upper-income families — defined as those earning more than $215,400 per year — vote Democratic, according to a 2024 Pew Research survey, as more highly educated voters shift to the left. The top fifth of earners went from supporting Barack Obama in 2008 by a 2.5-point margin to supporting Joe Biden in 2020 by close to 15 percentage points. “Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats,” one 2023 paper found. That shift intensified during the 2024 presidential election, when large numbers of Black and Latino voters, who tend to be lower-income, defected to the Republican ticket for the first time in decades, according to several political scientists, exit polls and studies.

“There’s been a lot of talk about how even though the Republican coalition has changed and gotten more working class, their policies have not,” said Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University. “But there’s been less attention to a similar but true fact on the other side — a lot of Democratic politicians were elected by very rich constituents who are more likely to benefit from Republican tax policy than Democratic policy.”
As a result, many of the provisions of the GOP tax law will benefit a voting bloc that is increasingly Democratic.