On a recent podcast, New York congressional candidate and democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complained about the outdated, stuck-in-the-1990s campaign strategy of national Democratic Party leaders: “They were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class. This upper middle class is probably more moderate but that upper middle class does not exist anymore in America.”

My best guess is that Ocasio-Cortez’s comments suggest a belief in a hyperpolarized, “1 percent vs. 99 percent” modern America. There’s only the rich getting richer and then everybody else. But that doesn’t appear to be an accurate description about what has been happening with incomes. (For more on Ocasio-Cortez’s thinking, check out “The uninformed economic views of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in 2 charts.”) As this 2016 story in The Wall Street Journal explained,

A range of data after the recession and the housing bust supported the idea that only a tiny elite of U.S. society, generally seen as the top 1%, had rebounded and was doing well. But a growing body of evidence suggests the economic expansion since the 2007-09 financial crisis has enriched a much larger swath of the upper middle class, and that a deeper income divide is developing between that top quarter or so of the population and everyone else. The latest piece of evidence comes from economist Stephen Rose of the Urban Institute, who finds in new research that the upper middle class in the U.S. is larger and richer than it’s ever been. He finds the upper middle class has expanded from about 12% of the population in 1979 to a new record of nearly 30% as of 2014.