[fleitz]

I think it's an intentional political doublespeak that people who are making a median wage think they are middle class.

Thus policies for the 'middle class' are policies they identify with despite those policies not actually being particularly well suited to their economic situation.

IIRC I believe 90% of Americans think they are middle class, even from a quintile perspective this is probably skewed.

[dllthomas]

The more reasonable "100k+" number that others have cited is still all in the top 20%, so while there may broadly be some inappropriate conflation of "middle class" and "most people" or "median income", that's not most of what's going on here.