| From | Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect <[email protected]> |
| Subject | Working-class heroes |
| Date | October 29, 2025 7:19 PM |
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Would democracy work better if more working-class people ran for public office? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
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****OCTOBER 29, 2025****
We're in the final week of our fall fundraising drive and we're still behind. A generous supporter has stepped up with a
**$15,000 match**, doubling every dollar you give right now. At a time when independent journalism is one of the few remaining xxxxxxs against creeping authoritarianism and when the mainstream press keeps consolidating into the hands of the world's richest people, our work has never mattered more. Help us close the gap and keep this publication fiercely independent. **Give today and double your impact.** [link removed]
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****Kuttner on TAP****
**Working-class heroes**
**Would democracy work better if more working-class people
ran for public office?**
A number of progressive groups close to the Democratic Party and the labor movement are trying to recruit working-class candidates. "The Working Families Party recruits working-class candidates up and down the ballot," says Joe Dinkin, the party's national deputy director. "We run trainings for hundreds of working-class people to run for every year."
It's far from easy. Running for office is time-consuming and expensive. Working-class people tend to be working. Few can just take time off to run for office. The most important pipeline that launches working-class people into politics, the labor movement, is far weaker than it once was.
"The experience of having to work hard for a living is familiar to most Americans but not to most elected officials," Dinkin adds. "There are more millionaires in Congress than working-class people." Too true. And the more the party is dominated by millionaires, the less hospitable it is to either working-class
candidates or working-class causes.
That said, getting the right candidate matters as least as much as the candidate's class background. Occasionally, an authentic working-class candidate who is also a superb politician breaks through. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was working as a waitress before she ran for Congress.
In Nebraska, Dan Osborn was a trade union leader who gave incumbent Deb Fischer a serious challenge in 2024 as an independent, losing but running 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris. He is running again for Nebraska's other Senate seat next year against incumbent Pete Ricketts.
Two other recent cases are less happy experiences. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was from an affluent family. He got an MBA and worked in the insurance industry, like his father. Fetterman then got a second master's degree from Harvard in public policy, and did a stint in AmeriCorps, which took him to the depressed town of Braddock, where he got elected mayor. He did well. He was far
from working-class.
In his successful Senate run and service, Fetterman affected d??class?? costumes and became a walking billboard for Carhartt. Even before his tragic stroke, he took some odd positions and has been more of an ally of Republicans since then.
prospect.org/donate
Graham Platner of Maine, the oysterman who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, is in big trouble because of a tattoo that he got while in the Marines that closely resembles the Totenkopf, a death tattoo favored by Nazis. He also spewed out racist and anti-gay social media rants, for which he has since apologized.
But as our colleague **David Dayen has pointed out** [link removed], Platner is the grandson of celebrity architect and designer Warren Platner, a collaborator of Eero Saarinen. His father, Bronson Platner, is a prominent Maine
lawyer. He attended an expensive prep school, the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.
Deciding to pursue an occupation that signals "working class," such as oysterman, is Platner's right, but it's not the same as coming from the working class. When he displays his occupation as a political badge of class, it's performative.
In Platner's case, we may even have the worst of both worlds. Earlier in his life, he displayed some of the ugliness associated with working-class rage, and he's not even working-class.
Some of the greatest working-class champions, beginning with FDR, were well-to-do class traitors. And some people rose up from the working class, such as Vice President JD Vance, who was saved from destitution by New Dealer grandparents and grew up to be a plutocrat whose famous book blamed poverty on low character rather than disparities of power. The real class traitor is Vance, a world-class fake.
Conversely, when Ted Kennedy, one of the great champions of legislation
to help working people, first ran for the Senate in 1962, he was 30 years old and was inheriting a seat from his brother Jack that had been kept warm for him by a family retainer until he was old enough to run. Campaigning at a factory gate, Teddy encountered a burly worker coming off the graveyard shift.
Worker: "You're a rich kid. You've probably never worked a day in your life."
Kennedy: "Ye-es, I guess you could say that."
Worker: "You ain't missed a thing."
There's another complication with the effort to recruit working-class candidates. As Tressie McMillan Cottom writes in an **important recent op-ed** [link removed], "working class" is often code for white working class. "[T]he working class in this country looks more like a Latino woman who cleans houses than it looks like Platner," she writes. And she adds, "Racism is not a natural
condition of poverty but a political weapon that rich men use to constrain poor people's political power."
However, the best of the groups trying to combine working-class with multiracial get that. Working Families Party candidate recruits are a rainbow. Having more working-class people in office, especially in local offices where they have a more realistic chance of getting elected, can help. Yet even Zohran Mamdani, the latest Democratic champion of class politics, is the college-educated son of a filmmaker and a Columbia University professor.
Mamdani understands the frustrations of working families-poor and middle class-as well as anyone in America and has the gift of turning them into compelling politics. And unlike Fetterman, he wears suits and neckties.
**- ROBERT KUTTNER**
Follow Robert Kuttner on Bluesky [link removed]
****On the
**Prospect??**website****
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Voters Did Not Understand the Stakes in 2024 [link removed]
Now, the buyer's remorse for last year's election is clear.
**BY RYAN COOPER** [link removed]
[link removed]
Trump Selling Out Cattle Ranchers Highlights Structural Food Economy Crisis [link removed]
To lower beef prices and help out his
pal Milei, Trump will quadruple beef quotas from Argentina. The bigger problem is an America that can no longer feed itself.
**BY DAVID DAYEN** [link removed]
[link removed]
Trump Is Illegally Withholding Food From Needy Families [link removed]
The White House claims it cannot fund food stamp benefits for November. But the legal authority to tap a contingency fund is quite clear.
**BY BRYCE COVERT** [link removed]
prospect.org/donate
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View this email in your browser [link removed]
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****OCTOBER 29, 2025****
We're in the final week of our fall fundraising drive and we're still behind. A generous supporter has stepped up with a
**$15,000 match**, doubling every dollar you give right now. At a time when independent journalism is one of the few remaining xxxxxxs against creeping authoritarianism and when the mainstream press keeps consolidating into the hands of the world's richest people, our work has never mattered more. Help us close the gap and keep this publication fiercely independent. **Give today and double your impact.** [link removed]
SUPPORT INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM [link removed]
****Kuttner on TAP****
**Working-class heroes**
**Would democracy work better if more working-class people
ran for public office?**
A number of progressive groups close to the Democratic Party and the labor movement are trying to recruit working-class candidates. "The Working Families Party recruits working-class candidates up and down the ballot," says Joe Dinkin, the party's national deputy director. "We run trainings for hundreds of working-class people to run for every year."
It's far from easy. Running for office is time-consuming and expensive. Working-class people tend to be working. Few can just take time off to run for office. The most important pipeline that launches working-class people into politics, the labor movement, is far weaker than it once was.
"The experience of having to work hard for a living is familiar to most Americans but not to most elected officials," Dinkin adds. "There are more millionaires in Congress than working-class people." Too true. And the more the party is dominated by millionaires, the less hospitable it is to either working-class
candidates or working-class causes.
That said, getting the right candidate matters as least as much as the candidate's class background. Occasionally, an authentic working-class candidate who is also a superb politician breaks through. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was working as a waitress before she ran for Congress.
In Nebraska, Dan Osborn was a trade union leader who gave incumbent Deb Fischer a serious challenge in 2024 as an independent, losing but running 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris. He is running again for Nebraska's other Senate seat next year against incumbent Pete Ricketts.
Two other recent cases are less happy experiences. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was from an affluent family. He got an MBA and worked in the insurance industry, like his father. Fetterman then got a second master's degree from Harvard in public policy, and did a stint in AmeriCorps, which took him to the depressed town of Braddock, where he got elected mayor. He did well. He was far
from working-class.
In his successful Senate run and service, Fetterman affected d??class?? costumes and became a walking billboard for Carhartt. Even before his tragic stroke, he took some odd positions and has been more of an ally of Republicans since then.
prospect.org/donate
Graham Platner of Maine, the oysterman who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, is in big trouble because of a tattoo that he got while in the Marines that closely resembles the Totenkopf, a death tattoo favored by Nazis. He also spewed out racist and anti-gay social media rants, for which he has since apologized.
But as our colleague **David Dayen has pointed out** [link removed], Platner is the grandson of celebrity architect and designer Warren Platner, a collaborator of Eero Saarinen. His father, Bronson Platner, is a prominent Maine
lawyer. He attended an expensive prep school, the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.
Deciding to pursue an occupation that signals "working class," such as oysterman, is Platner's right, but it's not the same as coming from the working class. When he displays his occupation as a political badge of class, it's performative.
In Platner's case, we may even have the worst of both worlds. Earlier in his life, he displayed some of the ugliness associated with working-class rage, and he's not even working-class.
Some of the greatest working-class champions, beginning with FDR, were well-to-do class traitors. And some people rose up from the working class, such as Vice President JD Vance, who was saved from destitution by New Dealer grandparents and grew up to be a plutocrat whose famous book blamed poverty on low character rather than disparities of power. The real class traitor is Vance, a world-class fake.
Conversely, when Ted Kennedy, one of the great champions of legislation
to help working people, first ran for the Senate in 1962, he was 30 years old and was inheriting a seat from his brother Jack that had been kept warm for him by a family retainer until he was old enough to run. Campaigning at a factory gate, Teddy encountered a burly worker coming off the graveyard shift.
Worker: "You're a rich kid. You've probably never worked a day in your life."
Kennedy: "Ye-es, I guess you could say that."
Worker: "You ain't missed a thing."
There's another complication with the effort to recruit working-class candidates. As Tressie McMillan Cottom writes in an **important recent op-ed** [link removed], "working class" is often code for white working class. "[T]he working class in this country looks more like a Latino woman who cleans houses than it looks like Platner," she writes. And she adds, "Racism is not a natural
condition of poverty but a political weapon that rich men use to constrain poor people's political power."
However, the best of the groups trying to combine working-class with multiracial get that. Working Families Party candidate recruits are a rainbow. Having more working-class people in office, especially in local offices where they have a more realistic chance of getting elected, can help. Yet even Zohran Mamdani, the latest Democratic champion of class politics, is the college-educated son of a filmmaker and a Columbia University professor.
Mamdani understands the frustrations of working families-poor and middle class-as well as anyone in America and has the gift of turning them into compelling politics. And unlike Fetterman, he wears suits and neckties.
**- ROBERT KUTTNER**
Follow Robert Kuttner on Bluesky [link removed]
****On the
**Prospect??**website****
[link removed]
Voters Did Not Understand the Stakes in 2024 [link removed]
Now, the buyer's remorse for last year's election is clear.
**BY RYAN COOPER** [link removed]
[link removed]
Trump Selling Out Cattle Ranchers Highlights Structural Food Economy Crisis [link removed]
To lower beef prices and help out his
pal Milei, Trump will quadruple beef quotas from Argentina. The bigger problem is an America that can no longer feed itself.
**BY DAVID DAYEN** [link removed]
[link removed]
Trump Is Illegally Withholding Food From Needy Families [link removed]
The White House claims it cannot fund food stamp benefits for November. But the legal authority to tap a contingency fund is quite clear.
**BY BRYCE COVERT** [link removed]
prospect.org/donate
To receive this newsletter
directly in your inbox, click here to subscribe [link removed]
**Click to Share This Newsletter**
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx,
United States
Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
To manage your newsletter preferences, use our preference management page [link removed].
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, follow this link to unsubscribe [link removed].
Sent to: [email protected]
Unsubscribe [link removed]
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