Kimberly Hoover has been to most Michelin-star restaurants on the East and West coasts. She and her wife, multimillionaires from their real estate firms, own homes in or near New York City, Washington, Miami and Quebec. Their lives are filled with skiing, fine wine and long trips to Europe.

Hoover’s accountant estimates that the new tax law that President Donald Trump signed this month will save her several million dollars over the next few years. While many Americans might rejoice at that kind of windfall, Hoover worked hard to stop it from becoming a reality, arguing to lawmakers that she has more money than she needs.

“At some point, it starts to feel wrong. It starts to feel excessive. It starts to feel somehow inappropriate. And at some point, it just doesn’t feel good,” said Hoover, who spoke while on break from a sapphic literature conference she helps sponsor in Albany. “Imbalanced is really not good for anyone, even if you’re on the positive end of that imbalance, because it’s unsustainable.”

The mismatch is partly a result of a crucial, if ongoing, evolution of the role class plays in American politics.

During the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, affluent Americans who benefited from tax cuts were more likely to be Republicans. The political party they supported delivered material benefits that boosted their pocketbooks. Democratic voters, by comparison, were more likely to be working or middle class.

Now, more than half of upper-income families — defined as those earning more than $215,400 per year — vote Democratic, according to a 2024 Pew Research survey, as more highly educated voters shift to the left. The top fifth of earners went from supporting Barack Obama in 2008 by a 2.5-point margin to supporting Joe Biden in 2020 by close to 15 percentage points. “Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats,” one 2023 paper found. That shift intensified during the 2024 presidential election, when large numbers of Black and Latino voters, who tend to be lower-income, defected to the Republican ticket for the first time in decades, according to several political scientists, exit polls and studies.

“There’s been a lot of talk about how even though the Republican coalition has changed and gotten more working class, their policies have not,” said Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University. “But there’s been less attention to a similar but true fact on the other side — a lot of Democratic politicians were elected by very rich constituents who are more likely to benefit from Republican tax policy than Democratic policy.”

As a result, many of the provisions of the GOP tax law will benefit a voting bloc that is increasingly Democratic.

The $3.4 trillion legislation extends a lower tax rate for the top tax bracket, rejecting the president’s suggestion of a new tax on million-dollar earners. It expands and makes permanent a smaller federal estate tax, allowing up to $15 million to be passed on tax-free ($30 million for couples). It also makes permanent a large deduction for businesses formed as pass-through entities, while raising the cap on what filers can deduct in state and local taxes. (The GOP’s 2017 tax law also permanently lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.)

When all these provisions are combined, Trump’s second tax bill devotes roughly $1 trillion in tax cuts for those earning more than $400,000 per year — roughly the size of the law’s cuts to Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for the poor. (Most of the bill’s cost, though, comes from provisions that largely benefit middle-class households, such as a larger child tax credit and standard deduction.)

Steve Lockshin, a financial adviser and co-founder of the estate advisory platform Vanilla, represents clients with at least $50 million and whose fortunes are sometimes in the billions of dollars. A tax cut of about 2 percent for a middle-class family translates into about $1,800 per year, according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. But for Lockshin’s clients, saving several percentage points in taxes can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, per year.