We Need a Blue-Collar Congress
Working-class political candidates are too rare. Nonprofits might be too powerful.
The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) has long argued that one tactic in the strategy to win back working-class voters is to recruit and run talented working-class candidates. Candidates that can credibly deliver a populist message in a language that is clear, unambiguous, and familiar to most voters. Last week, one such former candidate, Dan Osborn, announced a new Political Action Committee (PAC) dedicated to this exact goal.
In announcing the Working Class Heroes Fund, Osborn emphasized the importance of getting nurses, teachers, plumbers, carpenters and other workers to run for public office. Representatives of the CWCP voiced support for the new venture. With research associate Dustin Guastella and board member Bhaskar Sunkara writing in the Guardian:
Only 2.3% of Democratic candidates worked exclusively in blue-collar jobs before entering politics. Even if we broaden out the category to professionals like teachers and nurses, the number is still under 6%. Why? Mainly because it’s extremely expensive to run for office. Most workers simply do not have the fundraising networks or the ability to take time away from their jobs to run for office.
What’s more, as Duke University political scientist Nicholas Carnes has shown, the burdens of running for office are much higher for blue-collar workers than they are for those in white-collar professions because they also include the considerable challenges that working-class candidates have in persuading political gatekeepers to endorse their candidacies over much more familiar options in salaried professions who speak the same language and run in the same social circles. Osborn’s new effort to help ease some of these burdens is laudable for this reason.
The lack of working-class representation in government is also one major factor in explaining the dysfunction in our politics and the persistence of economic policies that seem to only benefit the rich. Working-class voters have been cut adrift. Their views and voices are invisible in Washington, and they see no real champions for their interests. One reason these voters are likely to prefer working-class candidates is that these candidates are much more likely to advance an economic agenda that benefits them.
If progressive forces want to win the working-class majority, they might consider finding candidates that are representative of the actually existing working-class. As Sunkara and Guastella argue:
the fight for working-class political representation was part of the origin story of self-conscious workers’ movements everywhere in the world. In the United Kingdom and Australia, the battle to extend the franchise helped give rise to labor parties. In Germany, the Social Democratic party swelled under the leadership of August Bebel, a carpenter and woodturner. In Brazil, the Workers’ party, led by a metalworker with little formal education, rose to become a governing force.
Even in the United States, at the height of the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations organized the first-ever political action committee with the explicit aim of getting workers into Congress.
It may seem obvious that working-class candidates are best able to advance working-class interests but addressing the challenge will take more than reasoned argument. Over coming the financial and political barriers for said candidates is no small task.
Beyond financial challenges, working-class candidates also have to overcome lopsided preferences. Professional-class candidates, like lawyers and executives, often win the support of political power brokers simply by virtue of their familiarity. These candidates are also far more adept at raising money and schmoozing in progressive spaces like NGOs, foundations, and nonprofits. Moreover, the power of these organizations has risen on the Left and, in the last half-century or so, helped replace the influence and functions of labor unions in the Democratic Party. Making it that much harder for workers to get a foothold in the political world.
Addressing some of these themes, director of the CWCP Jared Abbott recently reviewed Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics by Matthew Grossman and David Hopkins for Jacobin.
He writes:
Though the movement of non-college-educated voters away from the Democratic Party goes back as early as the 1960s, the “diploma divide” began to take shape in the early 2000s. By 2020, the phenomenon was impossible to deny. A gap in Democratic Party identification of over 20 percentage points opened up between voters with a college degree and those with just a high-school diploma, and a nearly 45-point gulf separated voters with a postgraduate degree from those with a high-school qualification.
The reasons for this divide are myriad but one major factor is that college-educated voters began to embrace increasingly liberal cultural views—views not shared by the working-class majority. Abbott continues:
while Trump’s dog whistles certainly raised the salience of cultural issues in the minds of many voters, so too did the Democrats’ pivot toward progressive cultural values, not just in the party itself but also in the media, academia, and even the corporate world. Polarized by Degrees argues that both Republicans and Democrats were to blame for heightening the salience of divisive cultural issues in American politics. In turn, college-educated voters, who were horrified by Trump’s attacks on minorities and liberal institutions, bolted from the Republicans, while noncollege-educated voters who couldn’t stomach what they saw as the Democrats’ capitulation to the so-called woke left turned to Trump.
Yet, as Abbott argues, one under-examined reason for why professional-class views were able to dominate progressive appeals, is the rise of the “nonprofit industrial complex.”
Grossman and Hopkins note that today there are more nonprofit employees in the US than there are manufacturing workers, around three million as of 2023. And public relations personnel makes up the largest share of the nonprofit workforce — a group that holds both very liberal political views as well as disproportionate media influence.
It’s easy to see how the influence of such a large sector of the economy came to replace the power and influence of unions in the Democratic Party coalition especially since, as Abbott concludes, the rise of nonprofit power coincides with deindustrialization and the collapse of union organizations.
One critical factor largely left out of the book’s narrative, however, is deindustrialization and the decline of unions in the United States. The impact that these events — and the Democratic Party’s failure to address them meaningfully — have had on pushing Americans without a college degree toward the Right, while largely not affecting more highly educated Americans is significant, although Polarized by Degrees gives these phenomena little attention. Decades of economic stagnation and declining economic opportunities in “left behind” areas of the country has bred intensifying resentment and mistrust of government, which has led many Americans without a college degree to stick a finger up to the establishment and look for populist alternatives. Seeing few or none from the left side of the political spectrum — Bernie Sanders notwithstanding — they looked to Trump.
It is true that this resentment often shows up in surveys as racial resentment or anti-immigrant sentiment, but as Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Rachel Navarre, and Stephen Utych have compellingly argued, “economic discontent, driven by long-term economic change…is often the root cause of [anti-establishment] . . . discontent . . . [but] economic discontent does its work not by directly triggering . . . discontent but by turning up the heat on whatever cultural conflicts are relevant in a given context.”
In turn, as Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol have shown, the declining presence of unions in communities most strongly affected by deindustrialization — combined, as Grossman and Hopkins show, with collapsing trust in mainstream media institutions — has meant that voters without a college degree often have access to few, if any, trustworthy counternarratives. This in turn increases their skepticism of, and resentment toward, liberal institutions and politicians.
You can read the whole thing here: Liberal Dominance of Cultural Institutions Hurt the Left