What the Midterms Meant for Working-Class Candidates
Time · Nicholas Carnes, Noam Lupu ·
"When working-class candidates run, they tend to do about as well as other candidates—and the 2026 midterms were no exception," write Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu.
We counted, and this midterm election cycle, there were just seven major-party candidates for Congress who had working-class jobs when they first got into politics. The last ballots are still being totaled, but many of the politicians from working-class backgrounds who ran won, or seem poised to win.
During national elections, we often hear a lot about the rare candidates who had working-class jobs. If you follow politics, you’re likely to know that Maine’s newly elected Senator Troy Jackson was a logger, or that New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a bartender. But these candidates are the exceptions to an often-unspoken rule of U.S. politics: the working class doesn’t govern.
Our research shows that people in working-class positions—manual labor jobs like construction worker, service industry jobs like restaurant server, and clerical jobs like receptionist—almost never go on to hold elected office. 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.