Why working people have been booted from government (and how to fix it)

A deep dive into the numbers, the problems, and the solutions

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Fast food workers in California spent years fighting for representation

If it seems as if politicians are increasingly disconnected from the everyday concerns of their constituents, it’s probably because they are increasingly disconnected from the everyday lives of their constituents. 

According to a new study, just 1.6% of state legislators across all 50 states are either currently or were most recently employed in working class jobs. More specifically, the study’s authors found that out of nearly 7400 state lawmakers nationwide, a mere 116 of them earned livings in manual labor, the service industry, a clerical position, or from a labor union. That’s down from the 134 legislators who qualified as working class professionals in 2022.

“It's just extremely hard to be a working class person and run for office in the US, and really every democracy,” Nicholas Carnes, a political science professor at Duke University and one of the study’s co-authors, told me. “Working class representation went down a little bit, but the big story in my mind is just that it's so close to zero to begin with.”

Blue collar cosplay has long been a tradition among vote-seeking politicians, who don’t have to worry much about facing real working class candidates. As the country becomes increasingly riven by economic inequality and culture war, their rhetoric has grown laughably incongruent.

Last August, two months after a kickoff event hosted by the richest person in the world, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sought to revive his flagging presidential campaign by declaring war on the wealthy elite. In his “Declaration of Economic Independence,” DeSantis promised to prioritize working families and end the “kowtowing to big corporations and Wall Street” — pledges that may have surprised the CEOs and Wall Street executives that funded his campaign.

Working class populism was an awkward fit on DeSantis, a Yale and Harvard Law grad whose career has been spent in the corridors of power. On the campaign trail, his name was printed on his shirts, cowboy boots looked like Santa’s elves discovered snakeskin, and his profligate spending on private jets evidenced little concern about gas prices. 

DeSantis’s policies, from enormous corporate tax cuts to bans on renter protections and higher local minimum wages, have been far more reflective of his adopted social class. And by and large, Carnes’s research has found that class helps predict policy, at least insomuch as the more working class lawmakers serving in a state legislature, the more likely it is to pass laws favorable to working people. 

There are ten states without any working class legislative members: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia. None of them are full-time legislatures

Carnes and I dug into the data and discussed the trend lines and challenges that working people face in running for office, as well as possible solutions to those challenges.

Progress Report: I know the number of working class lawmakers was at 1.8% the last time you did this study, so not a ton has changed — it was dreadfully low then, too. How far back does the data go on this? Was there a point at which it really fell off?

The earliest data I can find on state legislators is from the late 1970s. And in 1979, the best data I can find said about 5% of state legislators’ main occupation was a working class job. So in 40-plus years, we've slid from 5% to 1.5%. So it’s gone down from what was already a real underrepresentation. 

You’ve got a data set with the current or most recent occupation of every state legislator, and a few trends really jumped out at me pretty quickly. First and foremost, there are a ton of lawyers and business owners on this list.

That's a big chunk of elected office. The business owners are a little overrepresented, the lawyers are way overrepresented, and workers are way underrepresented. 

Educational attainment is generally considered a strong proxy for class, and a vast majority of lawmakers have at least a bachelor’s degree. But what’s interesting is that so many of the lawmakers who maxed out at a high school degree are business owners themselves, so they’re likely far wealthier than most Americans without a college degree.

This is part of why we use occupation and not just education by itself. Because in a lot of places, if you're gonna be a small business owner, you don't bother going to college. You don't get a degree, you go ahead and go into the business and work your way up or learn the profession and start your own business. But an auto dealership owner who didn't go to college, you wouldn't call him working class.

I think one thing I've tried to convey to people is that I care about working class representation, but I want every profession [represented]. My dream democracy is one where the legislature looks like the labor force in terms of its makeup, where everybody has a seat at the table. So anytime I say, “we don't have enough workers” or “we have too many business owners,” I'm not saying that business owners are inherently bad.

I’ll say that. 

[laughs] That’s a whole other conversation.

There’s a strange dichotomy where Americans increasingly resent the political, financial, and cultural “elite,” which they define in different ways, yet there’s a stigma against candidates who do come from a working class background or didn’t get a college degree.

I fel like voters actually don't really care about that stuff, because they're mostly voting by party. So really, the action is happening in the decision to run. I just gave a talk to an undergraduate class where I took my actual primary ballot and said let’s find out all of the main occupations of the candidates. And just like we predicted, there were no candidates from working class jobs. 

This was the primary, and so that’s where the action is: the decision to run and the support you get from the party. I really don't think working class people, if they ran, would have an especially hard time with voters. Taking time off work is hard, keeping the lights on if you have to campaign full-time is impossible. Back when I was doing this a decade ago, party leaders would often say to me “Oh yeah, I’d love to run a working class candidate,” but they didn’t.

I’m always looking to interview or write about working class candidates, but they’re hard to find, obviously. Have you thought about things that could be done to increase the number of working class people running for office?

You could set up a candidate school that's just for people in working class jobs. That's not the same thing as getting somebody on the ballot, but there are things like recruitment and training, at least, that you can focus on working class people. 

Some legislatures are part-time, and pay an average of $14,000. There are others that are full-time jobs that pay an average of $82,000. Do you think making more legislatures full-time would help attract and perhaps elect working class candidates?

The ones that are full time don't have any more workers and actually have slightly fewer, on average. California, you know is the most professionalized legislature, it's very similar to Congress in a lot of ways, but they don't have any more worker members. So the indication is that it's really about the campaign itself. Smaller jurisdictions, with fewer voters to reach, those places’ unions are stronger.

Parties seem to really prefer candidates who can self-fund, especially now, with races more outrageously expensive than ever. 

It's hard for everybody to run for office, but if you're a working class person, you are likely facing a lot more personal precarity than an equally qualified person who has a white collar job. Parties and interest groups, they’re at a disadvantage if they want to recruit a working class person. If your job is just to get Democrats elected or get Republicans elected, as long as the person has the right positions, then you want to actually find the person who has the easiest time. 

So I think that's why parties don't do more to get working on people on the ballot. I've heard party leaders say that in the short term, their job is to win this race. And so they're going to reach for the candidate who has the highest probability of doing that with the lowest potential cost to the party.

So basically the training and support is going to have to be prioritized by people outside of official party apparatus, whether that’s some advocacy group or union.

I’m so glad you brought that up. Unions have never, as far as I can tell, in the US, done a lot of systematic candidate recruitment work. And in most countries, it's rare to see a configuration where unions see themselves as candidate generating machines. But what unions do is they make working people's lives less precarious. So unions aren't directly creating candidates, but they can indirectly create candidates just by lifting up lots and lots of working class people, which then means it’s more likely to get that rare, rare person who wants to run for office coming from a working class job.

Occasionally, unions have done this work. The New Jersey AFL-CIO has a candidate training program for working class people, and some local and state federations are very much in the business of generating new candidates. UNITE does recruitment and training programs that target working class people, and a few years ago, New Haven, CT elected a majority working class city council because UNITE decided to find people to run in every district.

You can help them pull together a campaign, but what about the resources and time? 

There are a bunch of organizations that are in the candidate school space, but they often end up being clearinghouses for general support for campaigns. 

There was a city council candidate in Providence, RI. And her union encouraged her to run — it was an off-cycle election and she was a hotel housekeeper and her union was just like, “You should run for the seat. You're awesome, you’re politically engaged, people love you.” But she had three daughters. So the union said to her, “When you run, we'll help you get childcare. The nights you're out campaigning, we will just get people from the union to babysit.” 

It can be as simple as that. It’s just how do you help the person? How do you help the person find the time to run?

[Note: Carmen Castillo was ultimately elected in a special election in 2011 and re-elected twice.]

Does it help when a district isn’t part of some major media market? Or when there is public funding of elections?

Sadly, the states that have public financing don't have more working class people in their state legislature. Maybe if you came up with a super-generous public financing system [it would make a difference], but in most places, you still have to raise money and get lots of signatures to qualify for public financing. So at that point, you've already screened out people who don't have the time. You still need to start a campaign to qualify for financing. 

You can go back in time 50 years to when elections were cheaper, and you still don't have working class people in office. So it's not just the money. It’s really just running for office is massively, personally burdensome.

I think it’s vital to have more working class people in elected office, because they understand things that wealthier lawmakers just can’t grasp. But in terms of pure outcomes, do legislatures with more workers wind up proving more economically progressive?

States that have more workers in office are more generous, they devote a bigger percentage of the state budget to social welfare programs, they have higher corporate taxes. They look more pro-worker, less pro-business. There’s a correlation, but it's hard to establish causation in that situation, because we're not randomly assigning state legislatures. But individual legislators who come from working class jobs, tend to be more supportive of their parties. They tend to be further than left within their party. So it looks like this definitely matters. 

So it absolutely won’t be coming from a political party, so it’s up to advocates.

The solution is I think not gonna come from like reengineering districts or institutions. It's just good old fashioned grassroots work. The big growth in women running and holding office came from organizations that said, like, “hey, we want our women to run, we're gonna raise money.” 

With Emily's List, they decided we're gonna raise money year round and when a good female candidate comes along, we’re gonna recruit her, we’re going to train her, we’re going to dump money on her right out of the gate. We're gonna have her back every step of the way, we're gonna just do it like it's our full time job. 

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