What A Day - The Elitism of American Politics

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

In American politics, candidates often say they care about kitchen-table issues and working-class voters. Yet, if you look at both parties' candidates, you'll find they are more alike than you think: the same five universities and four careers. Jane discusses how American politics keeps folks with a 9-to-5 out of the race with Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, co-authors of "Keeping Workers Off the Ballot: How Democracy Undermines Working-Class Representation."Show Notes: Check out Keeping Workers Off the Ballot – tinyurl.com/yr7pkj2m Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

John Boehner used to say on the campaign trail, like, I'm a small business owner at heart, and that's the perspective I bring to office. He was telling the truth. And other candidates are telling the truth when they say, I had a working class background. And as a result, I know more about the problems facing working class people. I prioritize in my legislative work issues and concerns that are going to help working class people. And when I vote, I'm less often willing to sacrifice the well-being of working-class people for other goals. It's Wednesday, October 21st. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Wadde. Today, Russia freed Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American man who had been jailed for more than four years on charges of fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine. Top U.S. envoy, Steve Whitkov, completed the deal during a visit to St. Petersburg and offered these kind words to Russian President Vladimir Putin. You talk so much about my president of President Trump being in the United States.

humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir. I salute that. I commend you and I thank you again. Simmer down, Steve. This is embarrassing. Wiccoff also held talks with Putin about Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine as Trump pushes Kiev to make a deal that stops the fighting. We have less than two weeks until the midterms and one Supreme Court justice is saying, things are not great. Justice Elena Kagan said that voting and election decisions from her conservative Supreme court colleagues have, quote, created a democracy that does not work as well as it should. The understatement of the week. Kagan told students and professors at Catholic University's law school in Washington, D.C. on

Tuesday, quote, the people of America look around to think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare, and they're right. She blasted rulings that weakened the Voting Rights Act and campaign finance regulations while opening the door to more partisan gerrymandering. Kagan dissented from those decisions. Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramoswami's team has confirmed it produced a horrifying and repulsive advertisement I mentioned yesterday featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton. The campaign doubled down on the ad and said it will spend $4 million to promote it despite facing bipartisan rebuke. The advertisement features Acton's birth mother, Donna Arthur, calling Acton a liar and insinuating she has mental health issues.

Acton, Ohio's former public health director, hasn't spoken to her mother since she was 12. Acton and her brother were removed from her mother's custody after their stepfather was indicted for raping Amy. And then Acton's mother and stepfather went on the run. A spokesperson for Ramoswabi's campaign said Acton's mother was not paid for the one-minute video, which she said will continue to stream online and air on television. Acton's mother, again, chose her husband over her children in 1978 and is human garbage. But I want to talk about working class candidates. Namely, why don't we see more of them?

Joining me is Nick Carnes and Noam Lupu. They co-wrote the new book, Keeping Workers Off the Ballot, How Democracy Undermines Working Class Representation. Nicholas, Noam, welcome to Wadadaday. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So I'll start with you, Nick. Your book is about the working class

and how working class candidates have been kept off the ballot. You look at a bunch of different countries, but can we start out with who is the working class? Well, you know, there's no universally agreed definition of the working class. We focus on what people do for a living because we think that's so important to your place in the economy and in society. And we focus on people who have manual labor jobs like construction workers, service industry jobs like restaurant servers,

clerical jobs like receptionists or informal, sector jobs like day laborers. These are the kinds of jobs that don't require a lot of capital or formal education to break into. And they're the jobs that don't give people a lot of security and expose people to a lot of danger and precarity. They're also the jobs that society can't function without. In most democracies, these jobs make up on average about 70% of the labor force here in the U.S. It's a little closer to 50%. But these are the kinds of jobs that we define as working class jobs. And this book is about trying to understand why people from this enormous, extremely important segment of the economy in every democracy, why they don't have a shot at

going on to hold elected office. It's interesting, Noam, because there is no good old days when it comes to working class people being in elected office. It's people who last held a working class job in the U.S. before entering politics are roughly 1% of Congress and of the average state legislature. But Congress has never topped about 2% on this measure. You built a massive data set covering 97 of the 103 democracies with more than 300,000 citizens. This is a global issue. So how did this happen? How does this continue to happen? What's going on here? Yeah. So we think there's sort of two things going on. So on the one hand, the way that we select our public officials in democracies is through elections. And elections are really hard for people

to run in. That's true for anybody. It's true for working class people. It's also true for lawyers or business owners who want to run for office. It's just a hard thing to do. And you have to take on quite a lot of sort of personal burdens like having to spend the time doing the campaigning, meeting with people, maybe fundraising, going door to door, going to events, traveling around your district. All of those things are really taxing and they take you away from other things that you might be doing like herning income for your family, taking care of your family, supporting members of your family who are sick or elderly, right? All the kinds of things that we spend our time doing. I think that how expensive it is to run for office, even at a very low level, if you're running to be a member of your neighborhood commission in cities with neighborhood commissions, or if you're running for city council, it's really, really expensive.

But, Nick, there's the other half of this, which is that, you know, I'm talking about the United States, but this seems to be a global issue. political parties don't want to nominate working class candidates. Why? Well, you know, you kind of noted it's expensive to run even, you know, sort of what we might think of as very local races. And even on top of that sort of direct cost, you know, the money you might spend on your campaign materials, it's also expensive in personal terms like Noam was saying. You have to take time and energy away. And the people who identify, recruit, support new candidates. These can be party leader, these can be interest group leaders. They're different everywhere, right?

In every community, they're kind of different power brokers or maybe a little more positively, different sort of key civic organizations that bring people into politics. But none of those organizations, you know, in the U.S. or anywhere in the world, none of them have infinite resources, right? Like they can't, you know,

support every candidate, every time with all the resources they have. A lot of the people who serve in those capacities, especially at the local level, they're volunteers themselves. They're working for an organization, or for a county level political party, and they're just volunteering their time,

and they don't have huge budgets. And so they look for, you know, we might call low-hanging fruit, people who they know really well and who they know are going to have an easy time running. So they might look at a candidate who, you know, has a working-class job, who fits the description, you know, just perfectly,

but see that working-class job and say, hey, I know this person's going to have a harder time running. I'm going to sort of pass over that person in favor of a candidate who I know will have an easier time running who also kind of lines up with our goals. And that's the sort of other side of this. It's extremely hard to run. Working class people are in more precarious positions. And elites know it and they pass over workers. So I know that you didn't get into this as much. But is there a cultural piece to this also known? Because you have both parties in the United States talking about how we care about

kitchen table issues and working class voters. But then you have both parties who were like, actually it would be great if you went to one of about five universities and had one of three jobs. And when we encounter working class candidates, whether it's someone like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who was a bartender, you had the same people who constantly talk about how they want working class elected officials making fun of her for being a bartender. So it seems like there's a cultural piece to this as well? There is a cultural piece, I think. There's certainly, you know, no shortage of elitism going around. And I think, you know, my sense in the United States, a lot of the folks, you know, Nick was just talking about who do some of the recruiting and

particularly sort of at the national level, think about candidates, think that, you know, it'd be great to have working class candidates, but the next best thing is sort of working class vibes. And maybe we can sort of convince people. You know, wear some car, heart, they're ready. Yeah. We can sort of convince people that they're working class candidates without actually running working class candidates because they have such a hard time running.

So I think that is sort of part of, you know, the effort to sort of address the shortage without sort of actually addressing the shortage. So your book, Nick, talks about this explanation of why this happens. The burden on the voters, also the gatekeepers of the parties. So there are lots of other kind of common explanations you hear, and you actually knock them down in the book. So one common explanation is that voters don't like workers. Voters don't want to vote for working class candidates. They'll talk about how they want to see someone like themselves in office, but they will vote for someone who was a trial attorney, no disrespect to trial attorneys. Why is that, what did you find with regard to that? This is a really common explanation that you'll hear. I mean, if you just ask

people who, you know, haven't read this book or haven't listened to this podcast, you just ask them, you know, why do you think working class people never become politicians? Sometimes you'll hear, well, that's just what the voters want. This is a democracy if we're not electing working class people. It means voters don't like working class people. What we look at in the book is who runs and what find is that that choice has already made for voters before they ever get to the ballot box. By the time you get to, you know, if you take your, you take your ballot in this upcoming election and you just go through and look at all the candidates on your sample ballot before you walk into vote and you find out what occupations they had, my guess is you're going to be like

me and see basically no one on your ballot who had a working class job. So then when you elect, you know, a bunch of white collar professionals, it's not really the expression of sort of what voters want, it's just voters choosing between what they're being offered. In research where we show people sort of hypothetical candidates or in the rare times of working class people run, they tend to do about as well as other candidates, maybe a little bit worse in sort of big open primaries, but nothing that would explain why we have 70% working class labor forces in the average democracy and like 2% working class national legislatures than the average democracy. This really isn't a story where we can just take comfort and say, well, it's what the voters want. That's not what we're seeing in the actual

data. So, Noam, there's also the idea that working class voters aren't interested in becoming candidates themselves. They don't want to run. They've got things to do. They're very busy. And maybe they don't even really care about politics and they don't even vote themselves. So what did you find when you looked at that? Yeah, so we did surveys around 13 different countries, including the United States, we asked people about their interests in running for office. And this is an explanation that has been very prominent in research on gender and sort of why women don't make it into office. It turns out that it's actually, there is a big gender disparity,

and lots of women aren't interested in running for office as compared to men. But if you look at working class people versus people in professional jobs, that difference doesn't exist. So we have not found any evidence that particularly sort of high potential candidates, people who have sort of the characteristics, they consider themselves good public speakers, they work hard, they feel loyal to their party. In a whole host of characteristics, if you look at sort of the high potential people,

there's really no difference in their interest in running for office between working class people and non-working-class people. Nick, what has a lack of working-class representation in politics done to our politics? So in some of the early research we did as part of this larger project, we were really interested in this question of, does it matter, right? Like, if working-class people don't hold office, but policy is exactly the same, no matter what, maybe we shouldn't really do this research. And so we started out studying the effects of government by the privilege.

And what we found, you know, in the U.S. and in other democracies was that, like, it does matter. John Boehner used to say on the campaign trail, like, I'm a small business owner at heart, and that's the perspective I bring to office. He was telling the truth. And other candidates are telling the truth when they say, I had a working class background. And as a result, I know more about the problems facing working class people. I prioritize in my legislative work issues and concerns that are going to help working class people. And when I vote, I'm less often willing to sacrifice the well-being of working-class people.

people for other goals. This doesn't mean that there are, of course, lots of politicians who are really well off, who care deeply about the working class and do a great job representing them. We're not saying in this book that, you know, an attorney can't be a great representative for working class people. What we are saying is that would be the exception, not the rule. On average, people bring their real selves to office. And we all know, you know, what you do for a living is influenced by or influences kind of your outlook on economic issues. And so it really does matter. The old saying in politics is if you, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu, when working class people aren't at the table, their interests are very much being,

you know, their interests are very much kind of falling by the wayside. We'll get back to my conversation with Nick Carnes and Nome Lupu in just a moment. What a day is brought to you by Delete Me. It's October and that means it's everyone's favorite time of year. Cybersecurity Awareness Month. If this is the first time you're hearing about it, I don't blame you. You're probably thinking cybersecurity is for big tech companies, not for you. But did you know that over $3.5 billion, with a B, was losses scams last year in the U.S.? A lot of that might have been avoided with better cybersecurity practices on a personal level. So that's why our sponsor, Delete Me, is celebrating this month by giving you a few

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Get your free guide at netsuite.com slash wad. NetSuite.com slash wad. NetSuite.com slash wad. Let's get back to my conversation with Nick Carnes and Noam Lupu. So, Noam, in the book, you look at how in Germany, South Africa, Uruguay, and the United Kingdom, political parties created partnerships with unions to, quote, nurture steady pipelines of working class candidates. Now, the United States has far lower union representation than a lot of other countries. Also, the types of unions are different. So what does that mean for what this could

look like in the U.S.? How does union representation play into working class members of Congress or working class politicians? And how doesn't it? So the sort of rare cases where you do see large numbers of working class people make it into public office. What we found is that those cases really have a couple of things in common. And as you said, one of them is that there are strong unions, but not just strong unions. There are strong national union organizations, you know, big confederation of unions. The second thing is that those unions then have a really close relationship with, you know, typically labor parties or kind of center-left political parties.

And those are extremely close relationships. So, you know, the kind of canonical example around the world is the British Labor Party when it started at the end of the 19th century. And the unions actually sort of provided lists of candidates. They were involved in the selection of candidates for the Labor Party. Like that's the level of, you know, engagement and partnership that it takes to put working class people on the ballot in those cases. And, yeah, we don't see that.

We have never seen that in the United States. So, you know, the fact that there's been such a small proportion of working class people in office in the United States, as compared to the UK, is, you know, presumably because that relationship hasn't existed, and the union movement just hasn't been as strong as it was historically in the UK. Of course, even in the UK, that changed over time. And now the Labour Party, you know, the British Labor Party looks like the Democratic Party in the United States. I mean, it's mostly sort of lawyers and business owners and yeah. Yeah, I'm curious to how that happens, because you also mention Finland is mostly unionized,

and you still have only 5% or less working class representation. High union density does not offer a big boost to working class representation. What's going on there, Nick? Well, I think unions can sort of pursue their political goals lots of different ways. and electing their own members to office is just one of those ways. Here in the U.S., it's really common for labor unions to endorse candidates and to vet candidates and find someone who really shares their policy priorities and then sort of back that person, but they're not generating candidates themselves or not identifying recruiting and training.

There are some big exceptions. The New Jersey AFL-CIO has a longstanding labor candidate program, the working family party. A 75% win rate. A 75% win rate, according to, The New Jersey AFL-CIO, they've been running working-class candidates for more than a decade. It's the oldest program like it that we know of here in the U.S. And it works to the earlier point about whether voters like working-class candidates. Yeah, when the New Jersey AFL-CIO finds a working-class candidate sort of gives them the support they need to run,

they win 75% of the time. It's not voters keeping them out. It's a lack of those kinds of built-in supports and those institutional partnerships, as Noah mentioned, between unions and political parties, that's really what, you know, sort of durable progress is going to start to look like is, you know, these organizations that really form these partnerships and create that bridge to office for working class people. So something that comes up a lot is that contrary to what I think some people think, members of Congress don't make very much money. And there's an idea that that means that the only

people who can afford to run for office, whether it's Congress or even especially state-level office, you know, are people who are already wealthy. And if we made legislator pay higher, that would incentivize more people from different backgrounds, including working class people, to run for office to be, and so that, you know, they would not have to simultaneously be a member of city council, but also work two jobs. What did you find when you looked into that? Yeah, I've studied this here in the U.S. with my co-author Eric Hansen at Loyola. And one of the sort of funny things we found. This narrative always comes up after elections, usually when they're seating like the new state legislatures that have just been elected. And there's often a lot of concern about, are we paying

politicians too little at the state level in particular? And people often say, well, if it doesn't pay very much, only really rich people can afford to hold office. And what Eric and I have found in some of that research is that higher pay doesn't actually correspond to more workers going on to win because pay for winning an election doesn't address a lack of pay that you suffer that you experience when you're running for office. What's keeping workers out is that they often can't afford to take six months off work and do basically the volunteer work of campaigning and they're not getting support they need from parties and interest groups. And the prize that If you can't run a race in the first place, if you have broken leg, the prize for winning a

marathon doesn't really matter because you're stopped from really entering in the first place. And so, you know, I think there are lots of good reasons to think about legislation, for politicians critically, and it's a really thorny subject. No one likes to say we should be paying politicians more. I think there are good reasons to have those conversations. But the research really doesn't back the idea that, you know, raising pay for politicians is going to get us sort of more working class people in office. Well, if fundraising is such a big part of how people run for office and it's such a challenge

for basically everyone, as every text message I have received for the last two weeks would tell you, would publicly financing campaigns make it easier for working class candidates to participate in them? Well, no, not on its own. That's the short answer, right? So, you know, obviously having to fundraise makes it even harder to run in elections. But there are still all the other things, right? You still have to show up to all these meetings.

You still have to travel around your district. It's all the volunteer work that, you know, Nick just mentioned. And that's true even if you don't have to do a lot of fundraising. So even when we look at other countries, you mentioned Finland, right, other countries that have public financing for campaigns, they still don't have working class people running for office because the other things that are keeping them out are still there. So it's not to say that having to fundraise isn't additionally keeping working class people out of office or out of running for office. But there's a whole host of other things. And we often, you know, in the U.S.,

we often kind of fixate on the campaign finance part and forget, about sort of all the other things that make it hard to run. So, Nick, what would make it easier for working class candidates to run? Because we've talked about, you know, public financing. We've talked about, you know, other means that might not work. What would? Anything that makes it just easier to run for office is going to help to kind of lower those walls that keep workers out.

We know, for instance, that more working class people run for office in countries like the U.S. and Brazil for local races than they do. for state races than they do for national races. So we know and that's because you know running for a local race or a state race is just less personally burdensome than running for a national race. So one thing we can do is think about how to make running for office less burdensome. That's really hard to do because it might require things like shortening the amount of time candidates have to campaign. Japan has one of the highest rates of worker office holding in the world and they have about a two-week, they have a two-week window for campaigning. That would be a massive change from the way

we do things. I think people would like that. What a glorious world we would live in. You know, I would get so much done. Yeah, I've never had a hard time pitching that to people, just two weeks to learn about the candidates and to get those tax messages. So we can think about making campaigning less burdensome for the candidates. We can also think about targeted interventions that support workers. So seed money programs, income replacement programs, political scholarships or fellowships. We can think about pipeline programs that, you know, we think of like Emily's List, the model of raising money for candidates, recruiting, training them, and then supporting them while and after they run. We could do something similar for working class candidates in a sort of national way,

the way Emily's List did. And so we can think about those kinds of interventions as ways to increase worker representation as long as people are continuing to put that work in. The downside, of course, to any intervention where you're sort of subsidizing or incentivizing workers to run is you have to keep doing that year in and year out because those obstacles don't go away. It's always hard to run for office. So we like to say that workers have sort of, you know, they have durable obstacles and temporary or fragile supports. So you've got to keep those supports up. Nick, Noam, Thank you so much. This was so interesting. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having us.

That was my conversation with Nick Carnes and Nome Lupu, co-authors of Keeping Workers Off the Ballet, how democracy undermines working class representation. Before we go, if you haven't signed up for a Vote Save America Action Club yet, now is the time. There are only a few days left before the midterms and every action can make a difference. No matter where you live, or how much experience you have in politics, there is a place for you. In Club Vote Pro, you'll get trained in your rights and how to keep other voters safe and informed as they cast their ballots.

In Club Digi, you'll boost accurate, helpful information online and get those social media algorithms working in our favor. And finally, in Club Relational, you'll map your networks and organize the people in your life to get out and vote. Go to Votesaveamerica.com to sign up now. This message has been paid for by Vote Save America. It is not authorized to write any candidate or candidate's committee.

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subscribe. I'm Jane Koston. And honestly, I'm surprised when someone within Trump's circles isn't allegedly accepting bribes. Why today is a production of crooked media. Our show is produced by Emily 4, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Adam Lippert, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Cantor. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Long play, our docu-series exploring the people and forces shaping the the South is back. Newsflash, the South is the new political epicenter of the country. Democrats are

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