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In American politics, candidates often hype their connections to the middle class. Maybe they highlight their upbringing, the job their parents had growing up. Maybe it's the work they did earlier in their lives.
But what researchers Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu found in a recently published paper is that it is notably rare in American politics for any of these candidates to actually be part of the working class.
And that is having a direct impact on the kind of public policy coming out of the nation's legislative bodies.
"Politicians are people, too," said Carnes, a political scientist at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. "And a politician who comes from a working-class job really thinks differently than a politician who was a business owner."
Carnes said that when a legislative body is mostly white-collar professionals, their priorities "tilt ... away from the concerns of working people," from business regulation to the social safety net.
I've seen this in my years covering politics. I often talk to candidates who cast themselves as middle class, despite having careers that have vaulted them well above that economic status. Many of our presidential candidates have cast themselves as fighters for the working class, too, despite having tenuous ties to the group.
Take President Donald Trump. Dating back to his entry into the 2016 campaign, the two-term president has cast himself as a champion for the "the forgotten men and women," despite being born into immense wealth and privilege. While Joe Biden grew up in a middle class family as the son of a car salesman, he made an over 50-year career out of politics after going to law school.
"Although working-class jobs are essential to our way of life, people from working-class jobs almost never go on to hold elected political office," Carnes and Lupu write in their paper.
The numbers are stark. The duo found that while 52 percent of United States citizens hold working-class jobs, only 2 percent of state legislators in 2023 and 2 percent of members of Congress in 2019 "held working-class jobs prior to holding public office." No president in the post-war era has held a working-class job before seeking elected office.
So why is that the case? Lupu said the main barriers are that working-class people often can't raise money as effectively as white corporate workers and cannot take time off work to mount an unpaid campaign.
"Running for office means that you're not doing something else that you could be spending your time doing, and often that means not spending your time working at a job that you need to be working to support your family," said Lupu, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.
That's not the only barrier.
"Working-class people don't get recruited as a result of all of these things," Lupu added, partly because those "gatekeepers" who help recruit candidates are not connected to the working class.
I recently covered the race between Republican David Valadao and Democrat Randy Villegas in California's Central Valley. The Democrat's working-class roots - he co-owns an auto repair shop and is a political science professor at a local community college - have been central to the race. But Villegas also said he was told by Democratic operatives that this was a barrier when he started running.
"I had lots of people tell me, 'If you don't have a hundred people that you can call on Election Day for a thousand dollars, you shouldn't even run for office,'" he recalled. "And I was like, I definitely do not have that kind of network."
He also said someone in Washington, D.C., asked him when he was going to quit his job to focus fully on his campaign. "As if that was just easy for people to do," he said, noting he had bills to pay and couldn't afford to not work.
"This is why Congress is so out of touch," he said. "And why their priorities are all out of whack with what people are actually experiencing on the ground. ... You have people who are out of touch with those realities and experiences in our district."
Maine's Democratic nominee for Senate, Troy Jackson, is another example of a working-class candidate that the researchers wrote about. Jackson was a logger before joining the Maine House of Representatives.
"Examples like these are rare, and because they are so unusual, they often receive outsized attention in our political process, which can make working-class politicians seem more common than they really are," the researchers wrote.
So how could this issue be fixed?
Lupu said public campaign financing would help, and so would organizations that encourage working-class people to run, much like EMILY's List backs pro-choice women to seek office. The lengths of our campaigns are also an issue, he said, noting that "Japan has two-week election campaigns and a lot more working-class people."
But the issue clearly exists, said Carnes, because so many candidates without working-class credentials try to cloak themselves in the working class.
"Especially this cycle, it tells you working-class Americans are really hurting," he said.
"Politicians are picking up on something real. They're trying to exaggerate their connection to the working class. That's not an accident. It's them picking up all the economic anxieties and the precarity the working-class people are experiencing right now."
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Previously:
• Why this popular Dem is running like he is behind
• The divide between Trump and Vance on Iran
• The bipartisan rise of Flock cameras as a political issue
• Are data centers enough to flip a key House race?
• Voters want fighters. But where is the limit?
• Is the midterm cake baked?
• Is the midterm cake baked?
• For the DNC, no money, more problems