Of the many many pieces that I've read about this week's election, this piece about working-class candidates in this cycle merits broad attention.
Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu report that of the 933 candidates for Congress in the midterms, only seven candidates in the general election listed a working-class job as their most recent non-elected occupation.
Seven.
Drawing from their new book Keeping Workers Off the Ballot: How Democracy Undermines Working-Class Representation Carnes and Lupu place this week's election in broader historical context:
Working-class jobs make up over half of our labor force, but historically, the share of members of Congress who last had a working-class job has never cracked 3%. The same pattern holds in state and local politics: as of 2024, in the average state legislature, less than 2% of members have, or last had, a working-class job.
And yet when they do run, working-class people win elections and flip seats.
Elections are so expensive, and of course working-class people cannot simply come and go from their jobs to campaign and fundraise. Carnes and Lupu speak of the potential "massive" risk to reputations and futures within the volatility of campaigns that hit harder for working-class people.
But we can imagine things otherwise. Among the (excellent) potential changes mentioned in the article are recruitment and support through unions and [much] shorter election cycles. They of course have more recommendations that you should read.
Educating for Office?
What part might colleges play in bringing more people from working-class backgrounds to the table? At least some of those seven current candidates in working-class jobs did go to college, and breaking campus silences about class inequalities could begin to spark critique of the systems that sustain the "polarized inequality" of political office.
College is one of the few social settings in which students from privileged and working-class backgrounds potentially have sustained contact, and as always, I see only potential good in open and deliberative discussions – in courses, in guest speaker series, in arts events, in student organizations – about the need for class diversity in political leadership.
As a small part of building more working-class representation in political office (because so many excellent candidates will not be college educated), I imagine proactively preparing first-generation students for political leadership around their social class interests*, in sustained projects with potential privileged allies.
This could involve targeted paid internships in campaign offices and in congressional offices, courses co-taught by the political staff of non-profits in working-class neighborhoods, engaging privileged and working-class students in local political issues via special topics courses involving local activists who are building cross-class alliances.
And all of this would require specifically and directly educating those potential privileged allies about class antagonisms and casual classism in everyday life. It would require actively de-stigmatizing poor and working class backgrounds on campus. We can stop framing college success for first-gen students as "affluence replication" and instead support them in learning to challenge systems that they're now expected to fit within.
All of this would involve a core group of privileged faculty who are willing to take on the work, though it requires sometimes conceding how little contact they've had with anyone from the working-class.
Proactively recruiting students from the working-class to the elite colleges through which many political (and business and scientific) leaders emerge has to be part of the picture. The elite networking fostered by those colleges could also be a potential source of new funding for advocates of working-class candidates.
In short, I'm imagining colleges being much more pro-active about educating students from the working-class about power as an entry point into eventual public office.
Obviously, work on campuses is only small part of building political representation in times of growing economic inequality. But we cannot change what we cannot see, and colleges are failing the project of teaching about social class in politics and policy making.
It's a week of massive political change, so we can dream.
I've ordered Carnes' and Lupu's book and hope to write more about what I learn from them soon.
In the meantime, you can watch them interviewed about their research here:
*I see educating for leadership around collective class political interests to be a different sort of project than than the more common work of student leadership development written about by some people working in campus supports for first-gen students. The former would draw more from sociology and political science than from current Student Affairs models of student development and identity. And given Carnes' and Lupu's research, the former would also involve engaging more privileged students in actively networking and advocating for working-class candidates.
