Odd There Are So Few Members Of The Working Class In Congress? Remember, The System Is Rigged

In the last few weeks, I've been complaining that the elites who control both parties recruit elites like themselves to recruit and to support. When someone from the working class self-selects and manages to win a primary, those elites are more likely to turn up their nose at them than to support them. After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary about a member of the House elite club in New York, I sensed that the House Democrats were more vicious in their reaction than even the House Republicans were. I remember thinking to myself, self, I sure hope she has a thick skin! Ultimately though, I know what will happen. Pelosi and her cronies will try to coop her.

It was a similar story with Randy Bryce in Wisconsin. Bryce built his own @IronStache working class brand. The DCCC chuckled. Then he raised more money and got more press than any DCCC knucklehead they recruited from anywhere in the country. No one cared about any of their shit candidates-- most of whom seemed to be rolling off some kind of white collar assembly-line in the basement of DCCC headquarters in DC. Instead they cared about Bryce. The DCCC sniffed around to see if they could bottle what he was doing. Once they realized they couldn't-- and saw that he didn't "even" graduate from college and that he wore work boots to their soirees and wanted to talk about labor unions "too much," they dropped him like a hot potato. Ryan's corporately-sponsored SuperPAC saw a chance to keep the seat red. So far, they've poured $1.8 million into the district-- and announced today that they plan on spending another $1.2 million-- on behalf of their corporate lawyer Ryan clone, Bryan Steil (a complete nothing), almost all of it to smear Bryce. Neither the DCCC nor Pelosi's PAC has responded. They've decided to let him die on the vine, another damn member of the working class trying to crash their club. They want him to learn his place-- and fuck WI-01.


Nor, obviously, are Alexandria and Randy the only working class candidates being ignored by the DCCC. Nate McMurray has a good shot to win his western New York race. He's an excellent candidate and his Republican opponent was just indicted on dozens of serious fraud charges. But the DCCC isn't interested. Nate isn't their kind of guy. His dad died when he was young and his mom at age 35 was suddenly raising seven kids. They certainly struggled. Today, Nate, whose own struggle included working his way through college scrubbing bathrooms, told us he still cuts his own grass. "I know what it's like to work dead end jobs and worry about your family, about the finances of your family. My first priority is to help working families like mine growing up. I'm running against a man that inherited millions and exploited his public position to make money. I don't think he can relate to the people of this region. And that's why I want to go to Congress to fight for families like mine."

The guy in the video up top, Nick Carnes, wrote a book about why Congress has virtually no one who made a living with his or her hands, The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office-- and What We Can Do About It and yesterday The Guardian published a piece by him Why are so few US politicians from the working class? "Contrary to the ideal of a government of and by the people," he wrote, "new research shows Americans are almost always governed by the very privileged." He understands the significance of Bryce and Ocasio-Cortez. "This year," he continued, "at least two races for seats in the US House of Representatives will feature high-profile candidates with significant experience in working-class jobs – the manual labor, service industry and clerical jobs that make up over half of the American labor force. In Wisconsin’s first congressional district, the Democratic nominee is a delivery-driver-turned-ironworker named Randy Bryce, nicknamed “Ironstache”, who takes credit for “scaring off” Paul Ryan. In New York’s 14th congressional district, a former bartender and waitress named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines for her stunning primary-election upset over incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley. Candidates like Bryce and Ocasio-Cortez-- politicians with significant experience in the kinds of jobs most Americans punch in for every day-- are genuine anomalies in 2018, and in US politics more generally."

The president is the billionaire head of a global business empire. His cabinet is mostly millionaires. Most members of Congress are millionaires. Most supreme court justices are millionaires. Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public, but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.

The root cause-- and one of the reasons that candidates such as Bryce and Ocasio-Cortez raise eyebrows-- is that workers almost never run, even at the state and local levels. In nationwide surveys of people campaigning for state legislatures in 2012 and 2014, candidates from working-class jobs made up just 4% of both Republican and Democratic candidates. In California-- the one state that offers detailed data on the occupational backgrounds of candidates at the local level-- between 1995 and 2011, workers made up just 4% of candidates for county and local office.

So why are so few workers running? In a democracy like ours where almost any citizen can stand for elected office, why are the vast majority of candidates drawn from the ranks of white-collar professionals, and usually affluent or wealthy ones at that?... Just as working-class people in the general public tend to be more pro-worker (and business owners tend to be more pro-business, farmers tend to be more pro-farm, etc), politicians from different social classes tend to bring different perspectives with them to public office, especially when it comes to economic issues. In confidential surveys of state legislators, leaders from the working class in both parties are 20 to 50 percentage points more likely to support policies such as social welfare programs, regulation of the private sector, government-backed healthcare and efforts to reduce economic inequality. In scorecards that rank how members of Congress vote on economic legislation, those from the working class consistently earn significantly higher marks from pro-worker groups like the AFL-CIO and lower marks from business groups like the Chamber of Commerce.

Bryce: "There’s no question: if we want people in Congress who will legislate on our behalf they need to understand what working people go through. The problem is that we have auctions, not elections. Until we have meaningful campaign election reform we probably won’t see many working people drop their lives and try to run. It’s not easy, but it needs to be done."

These differences, coupled with the virtual absence of working-class people in our political institutions, ultimately have enormous consequences for public policy. States with fewer legislators from the working class spend billions less on social welfare each year, offer less generous unemployment benefits and tax corporations at lower rates. Towns with fewer working-class people on their city councils devote smaller shares of their budgets to social safety net programs; an analysis I conducted in 2013 suggested that cities nationwide would spend approximately $22.5bn more on social assistance programs each year if their councils were made up of the same mix of classes as the people they represent. Unfortunately, we can’t write off white-collar government as politically inconsequential. As the old saying goes, when the working class isn’t at the table, it’s often on the menu.

We also can’t dismiss government by the privileged as an inevitable byproduct of some deficiency on the part of working-class people themselves. It sounds odd to have to state this, but to the contrary, workers and professionals alike tend to have the qualities voters want – traits like honesty, compassion and a strong work ethic – at about the same rates. And when working-class Americans hold office, they tend to do about as well as professionals on objective measures of government performance. Between 1996 and 2001, for instance, towns governed by majority-working-class city councils were indistinguishable from other cities in terms of their rates of population growth, revenue growth, school spending, and debt. The idea that workers don’t hold office because they lack the necessary skills simply doesn’t add up. If just 1% of working-class Americans had what it takes to govern, that would be more than enough potential politicians to staff every office in the United States.

Last, we also can’t blame government by the privileged on some preference for affluent leaders on the part of American voters. When working-class candidates run, voters tend to like them just fine. Between 1945 and 2008, members of Congress from the working class earned about as many votes as those from white-collar careers. In surveys embedded with randomized control trials, voters are just as likely to say that they would vote for a working-class candidate as they are to pick an otherwise-identical white-collar candidate. When voters are asked directly why they think so few working-class people hold office, “workers are less qualified” is the least popular answer; around 75% of people surveyed in 2014 said that working-class candidates tended to be at least as qualified as white-collar professionals. When workers run, they don’t face a class-biased electorate.

Nonetheless, they seldom run. But researchers and reformers are starting to understand why-- and to identify interventions that might give working-class Americans more of a seat at the table in government.

...First, workers seldom run for public office in the US because of the fundamental personal burdens associated with campaigning – doing so always takes a great deal of time and energy, and working-class Americans are far less likely to have the time and energy to spare. When I surveyed seemingly qualified working-class and white-collar citizens, the biggest gap in their reported concerns about running wasn’t a fear about being able to raise enough money, or a difference in raw political ambition, it was a more fundamental concern about losing out on income and work in order to campaign. As one worker (who herself had run for city council and won) put it, “When you are working 40 hours a week and working 40 hours on the campaign, it’s too much.”

Second, and partly as a result, the party and interest group leaders who help people launch political careers often pass over workers in favor of more familiar white-collar candidates. In a 2013 survey of the leaders of county-level political parties, most were quite open about their preference for white-collar candidates. More than 30% said workers are worse at campaigning, more than half said that workers were harder to recruit and two-thirds of local party leaders worried that workers would make bad fundraisers. One survey item even asked party leaders to compare two hypothetical candidates; when evaluating equally qualified workers and professionals, party leaders were consistently more likely to back the white-collar candidate. Qualified working-class Americans almost never appear on your ballot in part because powerful people are less likely to encourage or support them.

White-collar government isn’t caused by voters, or some deficiency on the part of workers or even the soaring costs associated with political campaigns. It is caused by the simple reality that campaigning requires taking time off work and getting help from political elites, and working-class Americans often can’t do either.

From a reform standpoint, that is actually good news. Making public office more accessible to a broad cross-section of the economy won’t require significantly changing our laws or electoral institutions. People who work in and around government just need to devote more attention and resources to qualified working-class candidates.

Political parties and activist organizations already know how to do exactly that. Just a generation ago, women made up around 2% of Congress-- today that number is closer to 20%. What changed? Party leaders and interest groups began devoting time and resources to female candidates, working to identify talented women, and helping them overcome the obstacles that prevented them from running.

When pro-worker organizations have attempted similar interventions targeting working-class candidates, the results have been extremely promising. In New Jersey, for instance, the state affiliate of the AFL-CIO runs a well-established “labor candidates school” that has trained working-class candidates for more than 700 state and local elections. Graduates of this pioneering program have won 75% of the elections in which they have run and have gone on to have long and effective careers in public office. Organizations that understand the challenges facing workers and that invest in overcoming them seem to have found the key to helping the working class break through America’s cash ceiling.

A half century ago, women were anomalies in congressional elections, and in American political institutions more generally. Today they aren’t. Ironworkers and restaurant servers don’t have to be either.

Alan Grayson, who devoted much of his political life protecting and trying to improve Social Security and Medicare, grew up in the Bronx, a stone's throw from Alexandria Ocasio's district. Years ago he told me how he had put himself through Harvard by cleaning the toilets at night his classmates used. This morning I asked him if he thought this whole thing is a genuine problem. Oh, he does. This is what he told me.

First, working-class leaders can be great leaders. Think of Lech Walesa, an electrician, who almost brought down the entire Communist system.

Second, the absence of the working class from elected office has a huge impact on public policy. That’s why mortgage interest is deductible and rent is not, for instance.

Third, the great majority of candidates in both parties are people who don’t have to show up for work each day, whether they are lawyers, businessmen, retired, or simply rich. It’s very difficult to campaign for a major office and work full-time at the same time. In some cases, it’s also difficult for an elected official to live on the official salary. For instance, when Bill Clinton was elected governor, his salary was $35,000 a year [insert inevitable Hillary-futures-trading snark here].

Finally, both parties do discriminate against working-class candidates, not so much on the basis of elitism, but primarily because working-class candidates can’t self-fund, which is a fundamental consideration on both sides. (Another unspoken consideration is that workers have much lower turnout in elections.)  Despite the fact that both parties raise more than a quarter of a billion dollars for House candidates alone each cycle, they still have the mindset of being money-takers, not money-givers. There is no infrastructure whatsoever to raise money for working-class candidates, the way that there is for women, minority and LGBT candidates. It doesn’t have to be that way; if the unions were to decide, for instance, that they would back only working-class candidates (the way that some women donors give only to women candidates), then that alone would make a huge difference.

Nice song, huh? Ready for another version?



Great, huh? Now are you ready for a Senate candidate with a working class background? When's the last time any of us saw that? It's been a while. As on the June 30 FEC reporting deadline, Kevin de León had raised $1,310,851. His opponent, Dianne Feinstein, wrote herself a check for $5 million-- and then raised another ten million, only $886,109 from the kind of small donors who have given to Kevin's campaign.

If there a too few men and women with working class backgrounds in the House, you can imagine the scarcity in the Senate. It's what drew Blue America so strongly to Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Today our working class hero is even closer to home, like I said, Kevin de León here in California. Earlier today, Kevin told us that "for a very long time, wealth and privilege were prerequisites for any U.S. Senate hopeful. And while I don't begrudge my opponent her background, I take a different perspective as the youngest child of a single immigrant mother with a third-grade education, a woman who worked her fingers to the bone in very wealthy enclaves near San Diego. I learned the value of hard work by watching my mother’s ethic. She didn’t have access to venture capital for a startup that would potentially change the world as we know it. But she changed the world in the sense that I was born from her, and I became the only person of color in 133 years to lead the California State Senate. And ever since, I have passed laws that lift up working people like my mother. At the end of the day, my politics are about opportunity. That’s what people want, and right now we have a system that’s rigged against the majority of Americans."

You're getting an idea why we're so enthusiastic about Kevin's campaign, why we endorsed him and why we're urging DWT readers to contribute to that campaign by clicking on the 2018 Senate thermometer just above. Before you watch the stunning video below, just read one more quick paragraph, from Kevin:

"I shouldn’t be critiqued for my situation, and no one should besmirch the senior senator from California for being one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, or for being a billionaire. It is what it is. But, just as my background has informed my priorities, California's senior senator's background has influenced hers. For a very long time, the incumbent senior senator from California has had an anti-immigrant record and used anti-immigrant rhetoric. And that has helped feed this anti-immigrant hysteria at a national level for a very long time-- voting for a wall back in 2006, before Donald Trump entered the scene. And that is something I can't help but criticize."