Here's Why Poor People Keep Voting Against Their Own Self Interest

An explanation for liberals who don't get it

Photo by Marques Thomas on Unsplash

If you are living on beans, rice and the tomatoes from your garden, and you see someone else at the grocery store use a SNAP card to pay for a cart full of treats you can’t afford, there’s no way you aren’t going to feel like a chump.

This explains why some working-class people hate welfare. These folks are working their tails off but not necessarily living better than people on assistance. When you’re trying your ass off and sweating the rent, and you know somebody else who gets to live in public housing for almost nothing, there’s some room for resentment there.

I’ve been that person keeping a running total of how much my groceries were going to cost, and putting back a few things sometimes to make sure I had enough money to pay for it all. Food stamps would have helped a lot, but I never quite qualified for them. And yes, seeing others use their benefits to purchase things I couldn’t afford rankled. I’m not going to deny it.

Despite this, I’ve always believed in the need for a robust safety net with no shame, because I understand the root causes of poverty have at least as much to do with our system as with personal choices. I always understood, when I was at my brokest, that my financial issues were not of my own making.

That’s the opposite of what we are taught to believe. You can do everything society tells you to do and still not have enough money, which is a message everyone needs to start understanding. In such cases, blaming yourself for your lack of money is like blaming yourself for winter.

The working poor hate welfare

Some of them hate it more than the wealthy do. You’d think it would be the other way around, right? You’d assume a poor person would realize how close they are to needing that assistance themselves. But in my experience, people who struggle to pay their own way take great pride in managing to do so, and feel real anger at the people who don’t. They need to believe in the power of individuality. It’s all they’ve got.

This is something your average middle-class white liberal doesn’t understand. I think you have to be a working class liberal (like me) to be able to understand the nuances here.

If you are an educated white liberal who rolls your eyes at all the poor people voting against their own interests, and if you wonder why they fail to appreciate all the help Democrats are trying to give them through social programs, this is what you are missing.

Well-off conservatives also disapprove of welfare, but for different reasons. Most rich people move in circles where it’s believed that hard work always leads to success. It doesn’t, of course, but it’s easy to believe that when everybody you personally know seems to be doing fine.

These people usually don’t understand that their membership in a bubble of well-off people acts as a safety net. If they lose their job, they have the connections to get another and enough resources on hand to prevent them from losing everything in the meantime. If you’re in the Upper Middle Class Club, valuable contacts come free with your membership. The members of that club have no idea how different life is for people outside it.

Welfare outrage

So far, all these attitudes make a certain kind of sense, but there’s one more category that is very hard to understand: the welfare recipients who are outraged about welfare.

I have known many people who are utterly dependent upon some form of assistance but vocal about their hatred of it. And I don’t mean vocal as in, “I’m upset that I have no choice but to accept welfare in my situation” but “I’m furious that welfare exists at all.”

I’ve adjusted a few details to anonymize three such people I know.

Gail, the single mom in public housing

I blocked Gail from my social media during the Obama administration. I just couldn’t take her frequent online rants about welfare recipients anymore, given the fact that she and her teenage daughter lived in public housing and neither worked.

The last I knew, she had attended nursing school at no charge, but had not finished her degree so continued to depend on assistance to live. Maybe she’s found a way to finish and has a good job now. I hope so.

She was never able to understand she was exactly the same as all those people she vilified.

Roy and his large family on the medical card

Roy and his wife had a new baby every couple of years, and eventually they couldn’t all fit into one vehicle. A kind man actually gave them a van large enough to seat the entire family.

Roy was vehemently against any kind of universal healthcare. “When everybody has healthcare, nobody will have healthcare,” is, as best as I can remember years later, a direct quote of Roy’s. But Roy’s family didn’t have to pay for healthcare because they qualified for the medical card.

I was paying for my own family’s health insurance and contributing my tax dollars to help pay for the care of people like Roy’s family at that time — and was happy to do so, because I don’t want anyone to go without healthcare. I found that ironic. I don’t think that irony ever crossed Roy’s mind.

Roy was quite open about all the various programs that his family benefitted from. His wife took their children to receive free lunches from the township each day during the summer when free school lunches were not available, for example. You would think someone like Roy would support the idea of universal health care and various assistance programs, since he and his wife could not support their large family without them.

But you would be wrong.

Tom, the disabled and judgy man

Tom suffers from several serious health problems and has not worked in years — nor should he. If I listed all his diagnoses, you’d agree he needs to prioritize his health.

I’ve listened to Tom speak derisively of “Obamacare” and “Obamaphones,” both of which he personally depends on. I’ve known Tom’s family most of my life, and I know how conservative and wealthy they are. His family could easily support him if they chose to. That would relieve him of the need to depend on the various assistance programs they all hate so much.

I haven’t seen Tom for a while, but as far as I know, he still depends on some form of assistance to live. I think the need to take care of people like Tom is a pretty good argument for the existence of welfare. Maybe he’s seen the light and no longer speaks out against it now, but I doubt it.

The myth of the welfare queen

You probably remember that President Ronald Reagan spun a story about welfare queens living it up at taxpayer expense. With a few exceptions — because there will always be somebody trying to game the system — people who depend on welfare don’t have enough to live on. They generally have to use food pantries, secretly accept some help from their family, pick up and cash in aluminum cans, do some babysitting off the books or find some other strategy to survive.

They aren’t enjoying cushy lives. Most would actually prefer to work, if they could find a job that would cover their basic living expenses.

Decades ago, I knew a single mom just a few years older than I was who kept trying to get off welfare. When I met her, we were working in the same restaurant, but I was a senior in high school and she was already divorced with two children.

Again and again, she’d get a job and start saving money, but the long arms of the poverty monster kept reaching out and dragging her back down into the pit. When you’re just barely managing to feed your children, any illness, rent increase or car trouble is enough to throw you off. She finally managed it once she got remarried — because her new husband supported her and paid her tuition so she could get the job training that led to a decent job.

It would have made a lot of sense for society to have offered that kind of help to her years earlier. It actually would have saved taxpayer money and allowed her to start contributing to society much sooner.

Give back the Obamaphone, Tom!

Part of me regrets not having said, “But Gail, you yourself depend on this program. Why are you so against it?” Or, “Roy, if you hate government-paid healthcare so much, why do you accept the medical card?” Or, “Tom, shouldn’t you give back that Obamaphone that you are so angry exists?”

I don’t know how they’d react, but I suspect they would have become angry at me for not understanding that they are obviously nothing like those other welfare recipients. All those other welfare recipients are bad and lazy. Not them!

Gail, Roy and Tom are all white. I have a terrible suspicion about the relevance of that.

We do this on the state level, too

I’ve heard so many people in red states express anger about the blue states, not realizing that red states tend to receive more money from the federal government than they paid in while blue states tend to pay more money to the federal government than they receive. I have never been able to convince any conservative person that this is true.

They insist, with zero evidence because none exists, that conservatives are the hard-working people keeping this country going, while the libs just want to give away tax money to lazy people who refuse to work. This is such a core belief for some folks that no amount of evidence can ever convince them of the truth.

Even their own lived experience cannot sway their opinion about this. After all, even if they themselves receive welfare, their core belief tells them welfare is bad. And even if they work like dogs, they continue to believe that poor people are lazy. Even if they never manage to get ahead, they continue to believe in the American dream. The problem, they must secretly believe in their heart of hearts, is them.

Thus their anger.

If you are impervious both to facts and to your own lived experience, I know of no way to change your mind.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.

A version of this story originally ran on Medium on June 21, 2024.