About
The Center for Working-Class Politics, the Center for Work and Democracy, and Jacobin are proud to present: "Unions and Electoral Politics: Can Union Candidates Make a Difference?
READ "UNIONS AND ELECTORAL POLITICS" HERE!
Research team
Jared Abbott, Dustin Guastella, Benjamin Fong, Fred De Veaux, and Sam Zacher with editing support from Jake Triola and Ned Rust
Despite the desperate need for politicians to understand how they can appeal more effectively to working-class voters, we know relatively little about the most effective ways to do this. Recent experimental analyses of working-class voters’ reactions to hypothetical progressive candidates conducted by the Center for Working-Class Politics suggest that working-class voters will respond most favorably to candidates from a working-class background who use populist language recognizing working-class voters’ anger at the status quo and who focus on bread-and-butter economic issues that affect working-class Americans’ daily lives.
One of the major obstacles to understanding the underrepresentation of working class Americans in politics is the lack of data on the class backgrounds of candidates or the types of class-based appeals candidates make to working-class voters. In collaboration with the Center for Working-Class Politics, the Center for Work & Democracy is creating a dataset of all candidates who have run for Congress in primary or general elections since 2010 by recording the occupational backgrounds of candidates, how (if) candidates portray their class background on the campaign trail, what kinds of messaging candidates employ, what endorsements they receive, and where they receive their funding.
This dataset provides a wealth of insights for scholars and activists interested in advancing critical, but sadly overlooked research on the intersection of class and electoral politics.