Follow the Money In the Census: MAGA Is the New Working Class Party
By Peter Navarro | RealClearMarkets | September 16, 2026
Which political party is now the party of America’s working class?
The latest income and poverty data from the U.S. Census Bureau suggest a clear answer: the Republican Party as led by Donald Trump under the MAGA banner.
Forget the rhetoric for a moment. Follow the money.
Real median household income jumped 2.6 percent in 2025 to $87,460 — the highest level since the Census Bureau began keeping the series in 1967. After taxes, the story was even better: real median household income rose 3.1 percent, from $73,760 to $76,060.
That is what a working-class economic agenda is supposed to do. Not produce another seminar on inequality. Not expand another government program. Raise the real, inflation-adjusted income of the American household.
The poverty numbers tell the same story. The official poverty rate fell half a percentage point to 10.2 percent, with 1.5 million fewer Americans living below the poverty line. Child poverty fell a full percentage point to a historic low of 13.4 percent.
These gains also cut straight through the tired identity-politics narrative that MAGA economics somehow leaves minorities behind.
Real median income for Black households rose 4.8 percent in 2025. Hispanic poverty fell to 13.9 percent — the lowest level ever recorded. The Black poverty rate also fell sharply. These are not focus-group talking points. They are Census Bureau data.
The formula behind the MAGA economic model is straightforward.
Secure the border. Defend American workers with tariffs. Cut taxes on work and investment. Deregulate. Unleash American energy. Rebuild American manufacturing. Stop forcing American workers to compete against a virtually unlimited supply of illegal foreign labor.
For decades, the bipartisan globalist model operated on precisely the opposite logic. Offshore the factory. Import the product. Import the labor. Suppress wages. Then use larger government transfers to compensate workers for the economic damage Washington itself created.
Joe Biden’s profligate fiscal policies, accommodated by a Powell-led Fed—put that globalist model on steroids.
Inflation ate away purchasing power while millions of migrants poured across the southern border. Cheap foreign labor increased the supply of workers precisely where Americans without college degrees were most exposed — construction, hospitality, transportation, food services, manufacturing, and other blue-collar occupations.
MAGA turns that model upside down.