Nearly a third of American voters are living some version of this story. A new poll from the Roosevelt Institute, conducted by Impact Research in May 2026 among 1,000 registered voters, gives this cohort a name: the \u201cdisillusioned.\u201d It has a surprisingly precise definition, of people who believe the system is rigged in favor of corporations and the wealthy, that government involvement makes things worse, and that federal policies actively hurt the middle class.<\/p>\n
What the poll cannot quite capture is the exhaustion driving those beliefs. The disillusioned 32% aren\u2019t angry in the abstract. Eighty-five percent of them are financially worried, more than any other group surveyed. Nearly half say their quality of life has gotten worse over the past two years. Twenty-seven percent have dipped into retirement savings just to cover ordinary expenses. Forty-two percent have stopped saving entirely.<\/p>\n
The Roosevelt Institute is interested in what this means for the political future of the country, but this story is at root an economic one\u2014and it has been building for a very long time.<\/p>\n Start with who they are not: they\u2019re not primarily rural; not overwhelmingly conservative; not the caricature of the forgotten white working-class voter that pundits have been recycling since 2016.<\/p>\n Disillusioned voters are distributed across urban, suburban, and rural zip codes in almost exactly the same proportions as the broader electorate. They are 68% White, the same as the overall voter pool. They are nearly evenly split by gender. They span every age cohort.<\/p>\n What does set them apart is class and income. They over-index as working class (35% vs. 33% overall) and lower income, with 64% earning under $75,000 a year. Seventy percent lack a college degree. And they have made financial sacrifices at rates that outpace almost every other group in the poll: cutting transportation, buying groceries on credit, taking on gig work, skipping bills.<\/p>\n Their financial lives aren\u2019t dramatically different from the working-class majority. They\u2019re just a few degrees worse, sustained long enough to harden into a worldview.<\/p>\n And this is not a MAGA story:\u00a043% of the disillusioned identify as Democrats, 29% as independents and just 25% Republican. They are nearly a third of the electorate and they over-index as working and lower class. They are the 20th-century backbone of the Democratic Party, in other words, the type of voter that formed the \u201cblue wall\u201d in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that broke for Trump in 2016, and they remain hopeless about what the 21st century economy has to offer. <\/p>\n Elizabeth Wilkins, CEO and President of Roosevelt Institute, said it\u2019s less about politics and more about general sentiment in today\u2019s economy. \u201cI think this moment that we\u2019re in right now is really less of a left-right moment than a bottom-top moment,\u201d she told Fortune<\/em>. She argued that the nearly one-third of Americans who fall into this category are not necessarily at wit\u2019s end with the government, so much as fully disappointed with what they have versus what they were promised. \u201cThat is the dissolution of the American Dream \u2014\u00a0that you contribute and you\u2019re taken care of in return.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe disillusionment is not a full walking away. It means people have expectations, and those expectations haven\u2019t been met in the past, but we have an opportunity to meet them in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n Marc Levinson has spent much of his career trying to explain why the math stopped working for so many Americans, and when.<\/p>\n The economic historian, whose book\u00a0An Extraordinary Time<\/em>\u00a0traced the end of the postwar growth era, argues that the buoyancy most Americans associate with the mid-20th century\u2014rising wages, affordable housing, a sense that each year would be better than the last\u2014effectively ended in the early 1970s and has never genuinely returned. \u201cWe\u2019re certainly not getting back to the age where people could feel that their living standards were rising day to day,\u201d Levinson told Fortune<\/em> in a recent interview. \u201cIt\u2019s not like that at all.\u201d<\/p>\n What followed were decades of growth that looked fine in the aggregate and felt hollow in practice\u2014punctuated by brief spurts of genuine buoyancy that raised expectations before collapsing them. Think the dot-com boom, or the pre-financial-crisis expansion. And most recently, the strange, compressed labor market of 2021 and 2022, when COVID reshuffling briefly gave workers leverage they hadn\u2019t felt in a generation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe closest thing we\u2019ve had to it was actually immediately post-COVID,\u201d Levinson said. \u201cAnd that lasted for about a year. And now we\u2019re back to, well, if you\u2019re good, maybe we\u2019ll give you a little wage increase next year. That\u2019s about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Levinson, who declined to talk about his personal politics because he said they are just not relevant for this conversation the way economic data is, acknowledged that people didn\u2019t like his prescient 2016 book, which warned that populist demagogues would continue to be elected amid widespread economic malaise. \u201cI think the part of the thesis that really bothered people of all political persuasions,\u201d he said, \u201cis that there\u2019s not some lever the government can pull to fix all this.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilkins agreed, saying that for a brief moment during COVID, Americans once again were able to achieve the prosperity realized during the post-WWII boom. (She noted that government-issued stimulus checks and a proactive health care system were a big part of the picture.)<\/p>\n \u201cWe did have this moment where we brought part of it back, and then we disappeared it again,\u201d she said, adding that its disappearance is surely \u201cgiving people overall a sense of insecurity and uncertainty.\u201d<\/p>\n The disillusioned aren\u2019t wrong about the numbers\u2014the wider electorate backed up many of their opinions. The Roosevelt poll asked voters whether federal government policies help or hurt various groups. Across all groups, survey respondents said policies help wealthy people (+60 net), billionaires (+57), and corporations (+54)\u2014while hurting low-income people (\u201326), young people (\u201320), and the middle class (\u201318).<\/p>\n Fifty-two percent of voters overall say they can\u2019t retire comfortably. Among working-class voters, that figure rises to 67%. Among those with insecure income\u2014a category that overlaps heavily with the disillusioned\u2014it hits 73%. Only one in five voters overall are on track to retire with confidence. Among working-class voters under 35, that number is 8%.<\/p>\n The poll asked voters to rate the federal government\u2019s performance across nine policy areas. It received negative marks on all nine. Its worst scores came on housing affordability (\u201359 net), Social Security and Medicare (\u201353), wages (\u201353), and healthcare access (\u201351). Among working-class voters, every single score was worse, sometimes dramatically so.<\/p>\n These are not the results of a government that has been neutral. They are the results of a government that has, in the lived experience of a third of its voters, been actively failing them.<\/p>\n Here is where the story turns, and where it becomes relevant to anyone trying to understand what comes next, in business or in politics.<\/p>\n Despite their conviction that government makes things worse,\u00a078% of disillusioned voters support the Roosevelt Institute\u2019s Good Life Agenda\u2014a sweeping platform of healthcare affordability, living wages, expanded retirement security, housing investment, and worker protections. Their net support score (+68) is statistically identical to the electorate at large. Three-quarters say they\u2019d be more likely to vote for an elected official who backs it.<\/p>\n They don\u2019t think government is incapable of acting in their interests. Nearly half (49%) think this agenda is \u201clong overdue,\u201d more than any other group tested. <\/p>\n Levinson\u2019s structural lens complicates this in an important way. His argument isn\u2019t that policy is irrelevant\u2014it\u2019s that the forces suppressing productivity and living standards for most workers run deeper than any single agenda can fully address.<\/p>\n Levinson said left, right and center all have different \u201cpet theories\u201d about how to grow the economy again: \u201cmaybe you\u2019ve got to control the money supply better, maybe you\u2019ve got to pump more money into ailing industries, maybe you\u2019ve got to raise tariffs, maybe you\u2019ve got to give free child care \u2026 everybody\u2019s got their solution to the problem, but people are very reluctant to accept the idea that there\u2019s really serious limitations on what government can do about productivity in a deliberate sense.\u201d <\/p>\n He concluded: \u201cThere just are no buttons to push, and people wish there were.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilkins said this is typical of people in the disillusioned category: they still expect the American Dream they were promised. \u201cPeople are disillusioned, but they are ready to believe in something if there is a credible plan to deliver the building blocks of a good life for people,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n The disillusioned are not going away. Their financial distress is structural, not cyclical. The brief post-COVID window that offered relief has closed. Productivity growth remains elusive. The housing market is frozen. The retirement math doesn\u2019t work. And neither party has demonstrated, to their satisfaction, that it has a credible answer.<\/p>\n \u201cMost families aren\u2019t falling behind because they\u2019re doing something wrong,\u201d the Good Life Agenda framing reads. \u201cThey\u2019re falling behind because the system is tilted against them.\u201d <\/p>\n Wilkins said the government should take this into consideration when making new policy and looking to solve for the costs truly felt at the dinner table. \u201cI see that as the right kind of challenge and opportunity for policymakers,\u201d she said. \u201cI think that\u2019s evidence that the \u2018affordability crisis\u2019 runs a lot deeper than my weekly grocery bill. It is a deep sense of anxiety and insecurity about the future that we have an obligation to respond to.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Meet #Americas #Disillusioned #Theyre<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They cut the dining out first. Then they stopped putting money away. Then came the retirement account\u2014the one thing financial advisors tell you never to touch\u2014drawn down not for an… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5271,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1004,847,7736,1336,6812,208,3654,670],"class_list":["post-5270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-affordability","tag-americas","tag-disillusioned","tag-meet","tag-middle-class","tag-retirement","tag-theyre","tag-u-s-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/roosevelt.png?format=webp&w=1440&q=100\"\/)
<\/div>\n<\/figure>\nThe portrait<\/h2>\n
The long unraveling<\/h2>\n
The betrayal economy<\/h2>\n
The paradox<\/h2>\n
The stakes<\/h2>\n