Trump's Billionaire-Working Class Coalition Fractured by Class Politics

By Olivia Hart

Elon Musk poured a quarter of a billion dollars into Republican efforts in Texas alone — and Texas still flipped from red to blue on Tuesday night. That single fact, reported in Aditya Chakrabortty's analysis for the Guardian, captures what he calls a comprehensive rejection of Donald Trump in the midterms: a billionaire-funded coalition smashed apart, in his words, "by old-fashioned class politics."

Just a year ago, Chakraborrty notes, the consensus in boardrooms and column inches ran the other way. Corporate America and rightwing commentators declared a "vibe shift" — the belief that Trump's return meant permanent cultural realignment. One top banker told the Financial Times at the time: "I feel liberated. We can say 'retard' and 'pussy' without the fear of getting cancelled … it's a new dawn." Chakraborttty treats that quote as evidence of how confident the wealthy had become. The election results, he argues, proved them wrong.

What did voters actually punish?

The core driver, according to election analysts Chakrabortty cites, is the struggle to afford basics — a concern that now "polls in a tier by itself." He points to record petrol prices in a car-dependent country, wild swings in the cost of eggs and mincemeat, and rising rents. He is skeptical of softer labels: where the Democratic establishment says "economic issues" or "affordability," he sees class politics returning by name.

His exhibit is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who turned affordability from a meme into a winning platform and now, heading into the 2028 White House race, wields national influence. Mamdani's contribution, Chakrabortty writes, was tying high prices to low pay — arguing voters cannot afford basics not only because prices are unreasonably high but because wages are unfairly low.

The structural backdrop is stark. Citing economists Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster's new book Grand Theft Capital: What Workers Should Know About the Affordability Crisis, he reports that labor's share of national income fell from 30% in the 1960s to 20% today. Over decades — under Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama — both parties rewrote the tax code to reward ownership over earning, so the richest 400 households now pay lower tax rates than the bottom 50% of Americans. That translates to a ten-point national income shift away from workers over roughly sixty years.

How does AI fit the picture?

Trump's growth model leans heavily on artificial intelligence. Harvard economist Jason Furman estimated that AI infrastructure spending accounted for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 — a figure that suggests nearly all measured expansion came from one sector. In October, Apollo's chief economist Torsten Slok wrote: "Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America."

Apollo's analysis found only the "magnificent seven" tech firms among the S&P 500 were flourishing; the other 493 posted flat revenues and flat profits. Chakrabortty's framing is blunt: billions for Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang; a pittance for those outside Silicon Valley.

The backlash has a concrete object: the datacentre. Analysis for the Economist showed Trump supporters living near a datacentre flipped in droves to the other side. Texas, expected to supply over a quarter of all new AI computing power within two years, elected James Talarico on a squarely anti-datacentre agenda.

Talarico said after his win: "The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom … The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don't notice that they are picking our pockets. But tonight, we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top, we will not be conquered."

What comes next for the Democrats?

Chakrabortty reads the results as a new direction: anti-corruption, anti-war, anti-billionaire. Troy Jackson won Maine on a platform to abolish ICE; Abdul El-Sayed took Michigan pledging Medicare for all. Under Bill and Hillary Clinton, he notes, this agenda would have been deemed impossibly leftwing. His prediction: the 2028 Democratic ticket-holder "will sound more like Bernie Sanders."

He closes with Trump's own 2016 boast — "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" — and his verdict: "And truly, it wasn't credible." The lesson Chakrabortty draws is that when politicians and journalists claim no better politics is on offer, they are usually wrong. Whether the Democratic left can hold this coalition beyond one midterm night is the question the column leaves unanswered.