Saturday, January 11, 2014





Carnes performed simulations that showed that a number of important economic victories for the right "probably wouldn’t have passed if Congress had been made up of the same mix of classes as the nation it represents." The 2001 Bush tax cuts, for example, "didn’t receive a single vote from a legislator with significant experience in working-class jobs"(!). In general, the absence of working class legislators is associated with "tax policies [that] are more favorable to businesses, social safety net programs[that] are stingier, protections for workers [that] are weaker, and economic inequality [that] is significantly worse."

What can we do to alleviate this problem? According to Carnes' research, the issue isn't that voters are biased in favor of rich candidates. Nor is it the case that working class Americans lack the talents to govern. The most basic problem is that so few working class people run for office in the first place. In 1997, the New Jersey AFL-CIO, seeking to encourage a more economically diverse pool of candidates, started a program designed to "identify, recruit, and train" working class people to run for office. The project that resulted is the New Jersey Labor Candidates School. The school's graduates:
have a 75 percent win rate and have won almost 800 elections for offices ranging from school boards to the state legislature. Similar labor candidate schools are now in the works in California, Connecticut, Maine, Nevada, New York and Oregon.
The labor candidate schools are one promising approach, but the much more is needed. Carnes doesn't mention campaign finance reform, but publicly financed elections might also significantly alleviate the problem. When it comes to fund-raising, working class candidates are at a significant disadvantage. They can't self-finance, they're far less likely to be connected to networks of rich donors than wealthier candidates are, and they're also much less likely to champion the kind of conservative economic policies that would attract the support of moneyed special interests.

Of course, the chances of passing a reform like publicly financed elections would be dramatically improved if we elected more working class people to Congress in the first place. As is so often the case where economic inequality is concerned, unequal institutions become even more so because the self-dealing elites who dominate them tend to support policies that entrench their own power at the expense of the 99 percent. We desperately need to break this vicious cycle, in all its manifestations at all levels. Congress might be great place to start.


  1. who are currently the less than 2 percent of congressman that qualify as having working class backgrounds that you used for this article?