During the 2024 presidential campaign, both parties tried to seem like they were pro-family. The official GOP platform talked about “empower[ing] American families” and promoting the “blessings of childhood” as part of its goal of renewing “the pillars of American civilization.” To that end, the platform proposed expanded child tax credits. Vice presidential candidate JD Vance advocated for a tax credit of $5,000 per child and supported an expanded child tax credit without income thresholds. Other proposals were less specific: when, at an event in Arizona, Vance was asked how he would make childcare more affordable, he suggested only that grandparents and other family members could “help out a little bit more.” A month later, during a debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Governor Tim Walz, Vance also promised “paid family leave” and “childcare options that are viable and workable for a lot of American families.” He didn’t give details, and he didn’t say which families. 

Vice President Harris, who also supported the expansion of child tax credits, selected Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in part due to his strong legislative record. Thanks to Walz’s progressive initiatives, Minnesota has earned recognition as a leading state for raising families. In the debate with Vance, Walz touted Minnesota’s passage of 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave as evidence of his party’s support of pro-family policies. At the time, Governor Walz made headlines for his state’s achievements. One policy in particular—free school lunches—stood out. There was a memorable accompanying image from 2023, when Walz signed the bill to provide free breakfasts and lunches to students at participating schools, making Minnesota the fourth state in the country to enact such a commonsense policy. 

Once in office, President Trump attempted to replicate a similarly pro-child appearance on two occasions, each of which had nothing to do with nourishing children but with harming them. First, he posed with young girls and women around him when he signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. More recently, he sat at a tiny desk surrounded by children to sign an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. 

What was missing from all these tax credit plans and photo-ops, of course, was real discussion of the needs of impoverished families in this country. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the national child poverty rate is 16 percent.  This amounts to over 11 and a half million kids living in poverty. Homelessness among families increased by 39 percent from 2023-2024. Poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States. Read that again: poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death behind cancer, heart disease, and smoking. “Long-term poverty claims 295,000 U.S. lives every year, more than homicide, gun violence, diabetes, or obesity,” according to the Poor People’s Campaign. (The Campaign is a nonpartisan coalition named after the 1968 Poor People’s campaign, and advocates for the empowerment of the poor and an end to the “giant triplets” identified by Martin Luther King Jr.: poverty, racism, and militarism.)

Despite these damning statistics, during last September’s presidential debate, neither Trump nor Harris mentioned “poverty” or “the poor,” although Harris did highlight her middle-class background. In the vice presidential debate, Walz briefly addressed poverty. He said his agenda included “making sure tax cuts go to the middle class, a $6,000 child tax credit. We have one in Minnesota, which reduces childhood poverty by a third. We save money in the long run and we do the right thing for families...” Vance basically admitted that he benefited tremendously as a child and young adult from government programs that helped working-class families, including food assistance, Social Security (he was raised by his grandmother), and the GI bill. Yet he relegated those programs to the status of mere biographical facts instead of taking the opportunity to expound upon how important they are or talk about poverty in general. A similar thing happened in the 2020 debates, when the candidates largely failed to give much talking time to poverty.

In 2024, neither Trump nor Harris’s campaign was particularly interested in truly assessing the needs of working-class people in their neighborhoods or workplaces. Trump made a better showing of acting like he cared, though. He actively courted the Teamsters, appeared on a pro wrestling podcast, and even visited a bodega in Harlem. He also showed up to ‘work’ a 31-minute ‘shift’ at a McDonald’s during a campaign stop in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to (supposedly) demonstrate his understanding of the needs of the working poor. This was, of course, a stunt and an insult to actual workers. But his feigned concern for the working class nevertheless stood in contrast to the Democrats’ out of touch approach: hosting large rallies and fundraisers with celebrities and donors in comfortable surroundings. Harris, as reported in Politico, largely “avoided unscripted interactions” with ordinary people and chose instead to fundraise, raking in $1 billion and spending a lot on advertising and flashy events rather than investing in voter canvassing among key demographics such as African American voters in urban areas. After the election, Walz reflected that the campaign should have made an effort to do more town halls. Sounds like he’s on to something!

You wouldn’t know it from the 2024 campaign, but today, in our rich nation, millions of families are living in poverty and lack basic necessities such as adequate and nutritious food, safe and affordable housing, and good healthcare. And without a firm commitment to ending poverty through policy, these problems aren’t going to get any better. Only a left-wing agenda that promises robust social spending and economic justice can fix what is ultimately a solvable problem.

Who are the poor in the United States? Sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America, explained in a 2023 interview:

A lot of kids; we have over a million public school children today that are starting school this fall that are officially homeless. Elderly Americans are poor and increasingly poor in recent years. And of course, the poverty line traces the old American story of racism: Black and Latinx families have higher rates of poverty than others do in America. But most poor people in America are white, just because of sheer numbers. This affects rural and urban people at about similar rates; about half of the folks that are poor in America live in rural communities. And so, this is a phenomenon that’s found across the country and affects many different kinds of groups. Many folks are poor and working, too, which we have to confront. In recent years I’ve been doing more reporting on the working homeless, this group of folks that can’t afford a home but are still putting in 30–50 hours a week. 

Additionally, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities face higher rates of poverty than people who are not from those groups.

It’s important to note that homeless people in particular face vicious dehumanization by politicians, media commentators, the rich, and even in popular cartoons. President Trump, in a 2023 campaign video entitled “Agenda47: Ending the Nightmare of the Homeless, Drug Addicts, and [the] Dangerously Deranged,” said, “The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs. Americans should not have to step over piles of needles and waste as they walk down a street in a beautiful city.” He then promised to open up “tent cities” where homeless people could be “rehabilitated.” Fox News host Jesse Waters has advocated for “stigmatizing” the homeless, accusing them of being “anti-social” and having “failed in life.” Writing about the recent Super Bowl in New Orleans and how the city swept up homeless people and sent them to an isolated, barely habitable building ahead of the games, Alex Skopic explains how San Francisco tech executive Greg Gopman has called the homeless “degenerates,” a sentiment not uncommon among those of his class. Skopic also wrote in 2023 about how “cartoon depictions of the homeless increasingly reflect the hostility of today’s political leaders toward people on the streets. We’ve gone from images of charming hobos with bindles to zombies taking over cities.” 

This kind of dehumanization creates easy justification for cruel “sweeps” of homeless people and encampments. These sweeps, which are thoroughly bipartisan efforts, can be devastating. When authorities forcefully move people and their belongings off the streets, they lose important things like their loved one’s ashes, critical antiseizure medications, purses, and even, as one person put it in a ProPublica report, “my sense of self.”

Poor people who receive government assistance are also a favorite political target of the GOP, which always puts public programs on the chopping block. Current DOGE efforts to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” from the government—in other words, social spending such as Medicaid and Social Security—show just how politically expendable poor people are in our country (and how much the right wing hates successful government programs). 

No wonder people feel intense stigma around poverty. In a 2018 Economic Hardship Reporting Project piece, Stephanie Land wrote about hiding her poverty due to shame:

That fear of being singled out never left me; I wore it like a weighted vest. I felt the stigma of poverty every hour, even in my own home, but I never admitted to friends how desperate my situation was. [...] Struggling to take care of my daughter on my own, I needed whatever government assistance I qualified for – a few hundred bucks a month in food stamps, free school lunches, childcare vouchers and coupons for milk and cheese – while I simultaneously worked as a maid, juggling 10 clients between going to class to put myself through college. Very few of my friends knew. They didn’t know the work I put into finding these resources – hours on the phone, standing in line, handing over thick packets to prove my need.

Another less talked about but serious problem is the child welfare system, which targets poor families—especially poor Black families—for surveillance and punishment rather than providing them with resources. While many people assume that “child protective services” are there to help families, in reality, as sociologist Dorothy Roberts explains, the system is often actively harmful. Most children are removed from their homes for neglect rather than abuse. And that “neglect” often comes about due to poverty:

[T]his system [is] what I call a family policing system, because that's really what it does. It targets the most marginalized and vulnerable families in our nation, and it punishes them for being the victims of social inequities. So instead of seeing a family that has [material needs]—insecure housing, roaches and rodents in their apartment, not enough food or clothing, they’re unable to afford healthcare, they have a child who's struggling with a mental health disorder, and they can’t afford proper care for that child—and offering to provide these material resources, the response of the system is to punish the parents who are struggling with inadequate means to be able to care for their children. 

We can also ask why so many people are struggling with homelessness and poverty to begin with. According to an annual report published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2024, the increase in homelessness and poverty that we’re seeing is in large part due to record housing costs. Housing is simply unaffordable, and getting more so every day. The median home sale price in the United States is over $400,000, reflecting a 3 percent rise over the past year. These increases have significantly outpaced income growth, rendering home ownership completely out of reach for millions of Americans. As for renting, there aren’t too many cities where minimum- or low-wage workers can afford rent. As Matt Yan wrote in the New York Times last year, “American renter households are chronically burdened by their rent, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to recent census data. For people making minimum wage, finding affordable rent is particularly difficult.” Even the most affordable rental market, in Buffalo, NY, requires renters to fork over 39 percent of their income to rent. Combine this housing environment with the rising costs of other basic needs (food, healthcare, childcare), and many families end up working multiple jobs but still find it hard to make ends meet. 

To start tackling poverty, we must stop dehumanizing and criminalizing our fellow Americans who are poor, homeless, and working-class and start from the principle that everyone deserves a good life. We then need to look at what we know works: social spending via government policy. Programs such as SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, and Social Security help lift millions out of poverty. This is especially important for children, who are “highly susceptible to poverty’s ill effects.” We know that social spending during the pandemic, as Conor Smyth writes, was a “remarkable success.” It “dramatically reduced poverty, hunger, and inequality and led to increased wages, showing why we need more of such spending, not less.” We also know that universal, as opposed to means-tested, programs are easier for governments to administer and easier for people to use. We should aim for universal programs as much as possible. 

Bernie Sanders stands out as an exception to U.S. politicians’ usual reluctance to talk about the poor and their needs. Throughout his career, he has stated that “In the richest country in the history of the world, we can end child poverty.” To that end, Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project has detailed a “Family Fun Pack” of policies, what he calls an “ambitious welfare agenda that is easy to understand and provides universal benefits to a broad swath of the U.S. population.” The policy pack proposal includes free child care, parental leave, free pre-K, free school lunches, and a monthly child allowance (which would replace the existing “confusing hodgepodge of cash benefits” including tax credits). This is a great place to start.

When Sanders ran for president, he proposed the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights to ensure everyone has the right to a job that pays a living wage, quality healthcare, a complete education, affordable housing, a clean environment, and a secure retirement. This is another great framework to think about.

An antipoverty policy package could include, but is not limited to, the following:

• Raise the Federal Minimum Wage Now. $15 is not enough. A true living wage would need to be at least $20 per hour—and likely more in areas with a high cost of living. 
• Pass a Federal Jobs Guarantee. 
• Pass Medicare for All. This act would expand Medicare, which we know operates more efficiently than private insurance, to provide comprehensive benefits to all individuals in the United States, including primary care, vision, dental care, prescription drugs, mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and more. Services should be free at the point of use. No more copays, deductibles, or coinsurance. (Yes, we can afford it.)
• Stop cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. After the pandemic, both parties appeared to stop advocating for poor working-class families when they passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023. This act decreased Medicaid and SNAP (the food benefits program). We need to go in the opposite direction, reverse the cuts, and strengthen these programs.
• Strengthen Social Security so it can continue to be properly funded.
• Pass the Child Care for Every Community Act proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Half of families would pay no more than $10 a day for child care, and all families would have their childcare costs capped. 
• House Everyone: Make a commitment to house everyone as quickly as possible. Keep people in their current housing by enacting rent freezes and stopping evictions. Invest in public housing. Senator Bernie Sanders’s Housing for All bill would build affordable housing and make Section 8 vouchers more accessible.
• Pass the PRO Act, which will help workers have greater freedom to negotiate collectively for better pay and benefits.

As Desmond points out, antipoverty policy is a key component of a multipronged approach to ending poverty. The other two issues that need to be addressed are ending predatory fines and fees that extract millions each day from poor people and ending longstanding persistent racial segregation, which helps entrench inequality.

As both major political parties continue to prioritize the “middle class” in every election cycle, they ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable still live in poverty and suffer its effects. This is unacceptable in the richest nation in the world. 

A recent Pew Research study found that most respondents do not express confidence that their Congressional members are listening to their concerns or keeping financial conflicts of interest out of their public duties. We have a lot of work to do. We must organize in support of leaders who are committed to the material advancement of the poor and working class. 

Groups like the Poor People’s Campaign are doing important work to motivate poor people to fight for their rights by organizing protests and town hall meetings. But we need many more people to join in these kinds of efforts to educate and organize our fellow Americans. In my personal experience working with low-income families, many are unaware of things like the PRO Act, unions, Medicare for All, or other policies that would transform their lives. People living in poverty, understandably, are focused on survival. When one works multiple jobs and has to navigate complicated government assistance programs or haphazard public transportation, there may be little energy left over to seek out new sources of information. That’s why organizing efforts and media coverage of issues pertinent to poor and working-class people need to be engaging and easy to understand.

As Rev. William Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign emphasizes in his speeches, allowing so many people to live in poverty creates an opportunity for demagogues to exploit their fears, which is precisely what we witness today with the reelection of Donald Trump. We need transformative change with antipoverty policy, not more of the same tweaks and incremental adjustments that fail to raise the quality of life for those who are being deprived of basic things that many of us take for granted.