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Obama won Iowa, a swing state where 90 per cent of voters are white, in the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, but Trump triumphed there in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton by nearly 10 percentage points. Buttigieg pointed to his strong showing as evidence he could bring voters “back into the fold” and win a general election in November.

Trump has made his economic record central to his case for re-election, and used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to claim “incredible results” in the U.S. economy.

Last month, the president insisted that nearly all Americans have benefited from the country’s longest stretch of economic expansion, which began early in Obama’s presidency, and has continued for more than a decade.

“Are you better off now than you were three years ago?” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Almost everyone say YES!”

But the latest FT-Peterson Economic Monitor showed that among likely voters, white men are the only group with close to a majority who believe they are better off. Forty-eight per cent said they were either “much better off” or “somewhat better off” since Trump took office.

All other groups are significantly more dissatisfied — including white women, illustrating Trump’s persistent gap with female voters. Only 33 per cent of white women believe they are better off financially now than they were in 2016.