In Pew's analysis, which covered more than 200 metropolitan areas, only one city saw a bigger increase in lower-income people while seeing the middle class shrink. No city that was at least three-quarters white saw a bigger shift.

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Over that period, Clark County, for which Springfield is the county seat, also shifted how it voted in presidential contests. In 2000, it went for George W. Bush very narrowly — just slightly more Republican than the nation on the whole. In 2004, the same. In 2008, it voted nearly 10 points more Republican than the rest of the country, and in 2012, about 5 points more Republican. In 2012, it also contributed a chunk of votes to reelect the area's sitting congressman, a guy named John Boehner.

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One of the big questions for the November elections is the extent to which places like Springfield — mostly white, economically struggling — might help shift their states for Donald Trump. (Gov. John Kasich of Ohio won Clark County in the Republican primary — as he did the state — but he only won in Clark by three percentage points. He won statewide by 11.) Trump has repeatedly bragged that he'll carry states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan — a collection that would have pulled Mitt Romney to within 12 electoral votes if he'd carried them in 2012. But Trump brags about a lot of things, and not all of them are true.

Pew's research documenting the decline of the middle class nationally emphasizes that the industrial Midwest is home to most of the cities with the largest shares of the middle class.

It's also home to a number of cities where household incomes have fallen the most since 1999 — including Springfield, where incomes fell 27 percent.

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The presidential voting record is mixed for the home counties for the 10 whitest metropolitan areas where the middle class shrank and the most people entered the lower class. Five of those counties voted more Democratic than the country as a whole between 2000 and 2008, and five voted more Republican. But in 2012, the first election after the brunt of the recession kicked in, nine of those 10 voted more Republican relative to the country than they did four years earlier.

Only Clark County was an exception.

(Interestingly, Trump only won four of these counties. Kasich won three, two in Ohio. Cruz won the other three.)

One of the trends that's been slow to arrive in the Midwest is that of white voters without college degrees voting more Republican than those with college degrees. The Washington Post's Scott Clement pulled data from exit polls going back to 1980 to track how whites with and without a college degree — a good marker of economic status — voted in House elections over time. (This uses the Census Bureau's breakdown of regions.)

In 1984, white Midwesterners without college degrees voted more Republican than those with a degree — the only time that happened with the exception of the 2014 midterm elections. In the West, those without a degree have voted much more Republican since 2002. In the South, both college-educated and non-college-educated whites have consistently voted strongly Republican.

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver has looked at the idea that Trump's support comes from lower-income voters and found that in the primary, that wasn't the case. In the primary. In The Washington Post/ABC News poll released in March, we split up opinions about a Trump-Hillary Clinton matchup by race and self-identified economic class. Whites who viewed themselves as struggling preferred Trump to Clinton by wide margins — even more so than those who identified as lower class, but not struggling.

Quinnipiac University's polls from Ohio and Pennsylvania released this week show Trump preferred over Clinton by whites and voters without college degrees in those states. In Ohio, the margins were 9 points among those without a degree and 17 points among white voters.