When Rebecca Cooke introduces herself to voters in western Wisconsin, she notes how rough she and her working-class family had it when she was growing up.
“In high school, we had to sell our cows because of the price of milk and competition with other dairies,” Ms. Cooke, who is challenging Representative Derrick Van Orden, a hard-right Republican, said at a recent town hall.
Bob Brooks, a retired Bethlehem firefighter who is running against Representative Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican, in a Pennsylvania district that is one of the most competitive in the country, makes a similar pitch, describing how he was raised by a single mother who worked as a bartender.
“Pizza delivery, dishwasher, bartender, drove a beer truck, landscaper, coached baseball and yeah, I was a firefighter,” is how Mr. Brooks laid out his biography in his campaign launch video.
Even that sounds coddled and comfortable compared to the life story of Nathan Sage, a car mechanic who was raised in a trailer park in Mason City and is now running an outsider’s campaign for Senate in Iowa.
In a populist moment when voters are angry at a government that many believe has failed them at every turn, a slew of working-class Democratic candidates are entering competitive congressional races across the country with an appeal that appears aimed at being relatable, if not particularly uplifting: Our lives are just as difficult and infuriating as yours.
Gone is the aspirational “American dream” narrative that has long been a staple of political campaigns for lawmakers in both parties. And these working-class candidates bear little resemblance to the kinds of people Democrats have turned to in recent years to win elections, when they have recruited educated professionals with sterling pedigrees, including prestigious national security credentials.
These candidates are not trying to persuade voters that if you who work hard and play by the rules, you will be able to get ahead. Their message is that they, like the people they are seeking to represent, are working too hard for too little, and still struggling.
“We work nonstop every day, over and over, and it seems like all we do is survive, right?” Mr. Sage told voters at a recent event in Cedar Rapids.
It is a fitting message for a moment when the high cost of living continues to top the list of issues voters say they care about, and after a devastating election cycle that caused Democrats to spend months soul-searching about how they got it all so wrong. But it is one that party leaders have not fully embraced as they try to take on Republicans in astronomically expensive campaigns for control of the closely divided Congress.
Even though low-wage workers make up almost half the U.S. economy, the halls of Congress are still, by and large, populated by career politicians, lawyers and wealthy businessmen. About 78 percent of senators currently serving in office hold an advanced degree, according to Congressional Quarterly. More than 30 percent of House members and 47 percent of senators hold a law degree.
Working-class lawmakers in Congress remain few and far between.
“Nothing has changed,” said Nicholas Carnes, a professor of public policy at Duke University. “It’s been between zero and 2 percent forever.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who for decades has been hammering away at the issue of income inequality, said he is backing some of these candidates because voters instinctively understand that the political system, dominated by political organizations that can raise and spend unlimited sums on campaign advertising, is broken.
“The class issue is becoming very clear and apparent to the entire country,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “Working-class candidates instinctively understand the reality — they are living that reality.”
Mr. Sanders criticized Democratic leaders in Congress for not backing them as well.
“The Democratic leadership has got to make a choice whether they stand with their billionaire friends and corporate backers or whether they stand with the working class,” said Mr. Sanders, who is a member of the Senate Democratic leadership. “The leadership much prefers the comfort of wealthy people rather than working-class people and grass-roots organizing. That’s a profound mistake, and we’re in the business of changing that.”
The party’s Senate campaign arm, for instance, is not backing Graham Platner, an oysterman from the tiny town of Sullivan, Maine, who is running a long-shot campaign to unseat Senator Susan Collins, a Republican. Mr. Platner raised $1 million in the first week of his campaign, while signing up 2,700 volunteers. But the establishment’s preferred candidate is Gov. Janet Mills, 77, a two-term governor and former prosecutor, who so far has been circumspect about her plans.
On Labor Day, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Platner appeared together at a rally in Portland in front of 6,500 people.
“I grew up in rural Maine and I did four tours in the infantry. And I am not afraid to name the enemy,” Mr. Platner said. “The enemy is the oligarchy.”
Mr. Sage is also not the preferred candidate in Iowa, where the party campaign committee has yet to make any endorsement in the race for the seat now held by Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican who announced last week that she would not seek re-election. But party leaders have expressed excitement about Josh Turek, a Paralympic gold medalist and former pro wheelchair basketball player who serves in the state legislature.
Mr. Sage likes it that way.
“I feel like Chuck Schumer and the D.S.C.C. like to lose elections rather than win elections,” he said in an interview, referring to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “They’re comfortable where they’re at, they want to continue the status quo. It’s an unwillingness to see the writing on the wall.”
Mr. Schumer declined to comment for this article. But he has made it clear that finding candidates who can win general elections remains his north star, regardless of their background. He has focused this year on recruiting candidates who he trusts know how to win statewide races, including at least one with working-class bona fides: former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who was defeated last year and has announced he will attempt a comeback in 2026 by running in a special election for the seat formerly held by Vice President JD Vance. It is also still early in the cycle for the Democratic campaign arm to make any official endorsements.
But Democratic Party leaders also are not planning to back Dan Osborn, who worked as industrial mechanic at the Kellogg’s plant in Omaha. He is running again for Senate after significantly outperforming former Vice President Kamala Harris last year in an unexpectedly competitive race against Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican. The campaign arm works to elect Democrats, and Mr. Osborn is running as an independent.
On the House side, Democrats have been embracing some of the working-class candidates.
Mr. Carnes said working-class people are less likely to be able to run for office because it is time-consuming and costly to do so.
“Even party leaders who like workers know it is harder for them to run, and they have finite resources,” he said. “They know it will take more of their resources to support a worker candidate and they’re facing pressure to find the low-hanging fruit: a candidate who is going to have an easy time running.”
Mr. Carnes said people become distrustful of democracy when it seems that elected office is off-limits to working people.
“If we keep an entire class of people away from our legislative institutions, they’re not going to do a very good job understanding working people’s problems,” he said.
There have been some groups trying to create infrastructure for working people to run for office, including unions in Nevada and New Jersey that train workers to run for office. And after the 2024 election, a group of veteran consultants from the campaigns of Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, as well as those of Mr. Osborn and Mr. Sanders, decided to invest in new types of candidates to help the party move in a different direction.
They started Fight Agency, which has helped launch a number of working-class candidates’ campaigns this cycle, including those of Mr. Brooks, Mr. Platner, Mr. Osborn and some other candidates running populist campaigns.
Some of the current crop of working-class candidates are running again after coming close two years ago. Ms. Cooke ran for Congress in 2024 and lost to Mr. Van Orden by less than 3 percentage points. She outperformed Ms. Harris by roughly 9,000 votes and Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, by about 5,000 votes in a southwestern Wisconsin district that includes Eau Claire.
Still, working-class candidates remain rare even if it seems like there are more than usual who are gaining some early traction.
“What we count as a lot,” Mr. Carnes said, “is still really low.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership.
The post In the Battle for Congress, Working-Class Democrats Try a Hardscrabble Pitch appeared first on New York Times.
