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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have given minimal attention to poverty in this campaign season

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Can we talk about poverty for a minute? Because no one on the national campaign trail is.

In the lead-up to the presidential election this year, there has been a noticeable lack of discussion about one of America's most persistent struggles. We've heard about jobs, walls, ISIS, Russia and emails, but both candidates have largely skirted large scale issues affecting the poor.

Nationwide, nearly 48 million people live below the poverty level, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (though there are some issues over how that number is measured). Still, poverty is an undeniable fact of life for many Americans -- one that isn't getting much credence at the national level.

A story Thursday morning from The New York Times highlighted the lack of poverty talk on the campaign trail. While both candidates have focused rhetoric on jobs, the poorest Americans have typically been left out of the discussion.

In Syracuse, poverty is a particularly rampant problem. Census data released last year showed one in two children live in poverty. A study found we have the nation's highest rate of extreme poverty concentrated among blacks and Hispanics.

Sally Santangelo, executive director of CNY Fair Housing in Syracuse, said campaigns typically tend to focus on the middle class and avoid the poor.

"Talking about poverty, in the kind of hard way that we have to, isn't often a campaign topic," Santangelo said. "It's an uncomfortable conversation to have, and one we're not seeing as much nationally now, though we're seeing it around issues with the criminal justice program."

The 2016 campaign cycle has, instead, been routinely hijacked by non-policy concerns, especially as Donald Trump's demeanor continues to dominate Internet headlines and TV talk shows. The issues receiving the most lip service this year are things like immigration, foreign policy, police-community relations and middle class jobs.

For America's poor, however, housing remains one of the most critical issues, along with things like education and health care, Santangelo said. There have been few (if any) big speeches on those topics.

Santangelo said many fair housing advocates were hopeful the topic would get some attention when Hillary Clinton added Sen. Tim Kaine to the Democratic ticket. Kaine was a fair housing attorney for 20 years in Virginia and won a $100 million verdict in a red-lining case against Nationwide Insurance.

"That's a perfect person to hopefully help inject this conversation and it will be interesting to see in the VP debates if it comes up as an issue," she said.

So far, however, Kaine has been mostly kept out of the spotlight.

'Poor people don't vote'

On the whole, campaigns tend not to dwell on poverty. Former candidate Bernie Sanders acknowledged the lack of attention on the poor in an interview following the New York primary. He told NBC's Chuck Todd that "poor people don't vote."

"That's a sad reality of American society," Sanders said. "And that's why we have to transform one, as you know, one of the lowest voter turnouts of any major society of Earth. We have done a good job of bringing young people. But in America today, the last election in 2014, 80 percent of poor people did not vote."

NPR found that claim to be somewhat true, though it was hard to precisely measure voter rates for the poor.

Sanders made income inequality one of the key issues of his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination. His message resonated with young people and liberals, but he couldn't garner enough mass appeal to win the nomination.

"The middle class is always the place to campaign," Santangelo said. "That's a reality we're not going to see change."