The New Political Arms Race: Proving You’re Working Class

ALBANY, New York — Blue collar cred for any candidate helps. Making voters think they’re part of a financially struggling working class is the newest playbook.

These efforts — meant to empathize with voters’ cost-of-living woes that have now enveloped people who earn more than six figures — are playing out across the country as both parties race to define who is truly hurting.

In New York, where left-flank candidates are beating institutional Democrats, this dynamic is set against the backdrop of voter fears that their generation will not experience the same sort of financial comfort their parents enjoyed.

Gone are the days of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer writing a book about the struggles of an imaginary middle class couple. Candidates instead are making a more aggressive appeal to the many voters who feel they’re falling behind financially.

Think of it as Joe the Plumber 2.0 — but this time he works in an office.

“When it comes to the working class label it’s the notion that those who are doing well are kind of part of an elite group and those who are struggling are an afterthought,” Marist College pollster Lee Miringoff said. “Part of that is the outsider status, you’re not part of the ‘in crowd,’ all things being equal, you're on the side of shaking things up. If you’re having difficulty making ends meet, shaking things up is a nice approach.”

As middle-income households contract and find it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, campaigns have taken to directly pursue “working” people.

How candidates frame themselves has become crucial as voters are increasingly willing to back outsider candidates and have little patience for longtime incumbents vying to remain in office. This sentiment has led to an increasingly elastic definition of who is “working class” as families grapple with the ever growing cost of buying a first home and raising a family.

In a political environment where people with college degrees and six-figure jobs don’t feel as economically secure as their parents, politicians have cast a wider net for who makes up the working class — especially in deeply expensive New York City.

There, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has applied a broadened interpretation to the term working class, which he’s described as the “only one majority in this country” — even as he avoids casting himself as part of that group.

“My focus is on those who are struggling to afford life in this city,” he told reporters in July when asked if he considers himself working class. “We see that that definition has expanded over time. Who struggles in this city? The definition we used to have of how much money to survive in this city clearly has not kept up with the costs that we’ve seen in this city.”

To that end, politicians are going beyond the time-worn ritual of donning a Carhartt jacket to illustrate a one-of-us ethos. They’re now attempting to widen who falls under the blue collar umbrella as campaigns seize on voters’ deep anxiety over their long-term economic futures.

And they are going to lengths to show that they get it.

One upstate New York House candidate’s TV ad shows the Democrat milking cows on his family farm before sunrise. A GOP congressional hopeful on Long Island described himself as “the son of a union leader” in a biographical commercial. And Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks frequently about her parents starting their life together in a trailer.

The Democratic governor, who’s seeking a second full term this November, has alternated how she describes her own family over the years.

Running in a deep red House district in western New York in 2012, her campaign website at the time said she came “from a business family” and that the “government doesn’t create jobs — American businesses do.” After accepting the nomination for lieutenant governor to a broad audience, Hochul said her parents began “married life very humbly.” When speaking at a gathering of the influential Business Council in 2024, she also described coming from a hard-working “business family.” Touting labor endorsements this past May, the governor said she was “someone who grew up in a union family.” Her current campaign bio online says her family was “blue collar.”

Both descriptions can be true: Her father, John Courtney, started his career at Bethlehem Steel before joining a technology startup in 1968, where he eventually became the company president and chief operating officer.

Her Republican foe, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, has also burnished a blue collar image, telling an interviewer he’s worked as “a bartender, a busboy, a janitor, a bouncer, worked in the back of a garbage truck.” One of his jobs as an attorney? Becoming a founding partner at his father’s law firm.

Hochul’s campaign didn’t comment.

Middle class markers — a stable job, getting on the home-buying ladder and brightening economic conditions — have given way to a sense of financial stalling out for younger voters. As a result, emphasizing a hardscrabble existence or upbringing can help candidates connect with voters struggling to afford gas and groceries.

Now candidates themselves — who often come to campaigns with law degrees or business backgrounds — would rather focus on the humble aspects of their biographies to express an understanding of voters’ financial strain. Doing so has been an imperative for left-of-center parties around the globe as conservative populism — demonstrated by President Donald Trump in the United States — has painted the Democrats and Labour in the United Kingdom as catering more toward the well educated and affluent.

Candidates across the globe have reflected back the sentiment.

Former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer would frequently invoke his father’s work as a toolmaker in an effort to connect with lower-income Britons who had drifted away from the Labour Party. Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign was scrutinized by Republicans after she talked about working at McDonald’s as a teenager for pocket money.

It didn’t work. Harris lost to Trump and Starmer was replaced last month as prime minister amid low poll numbers. Their failures underscore the high-wire act for politicians desperate to show relatability as anti-incumbent sentiment runs hot.

“Republicans and Democrats just love a little blue collar slumming,” said Transport Workers Union International President John Samuelsen. “It absolutely comes with a presumption on the part of politicians that they can get one over on workers, they can somehow fool workers. Workers are not stupid, despite the fact a lot of politicians think they are.”

At the same time, the fixation with winning over the broad working class category and the dramatically shifting voting patterns in New York City has upended election strategy there — making a college degree or education level an increasingly reliable indication of how a person will cast their vote.

Elections, once driven by organizing blocs of voters along racial, ethnic and religious lines, have increasingly become determined by ballots cast by those who share similar economic or educational backgrounds. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign last year amassed a coalition of older Black voters and Jewish New Yorkers — a fusion that typically translates to victory.

Mamdani’s upset win, however, altered that calculus. The mayor’s open-ended definition of what it means to be working class in a city where paying for rent, buying a home or affording child care is increasingly too costly for many families — even those in traditional white-collar professions — is an indication of how he’s leveraged this swirling discontent.

“Politicians take advantage of the fact that this is something that cuts across religious and ethnic and racial lines and it’s something they can hone on,” said J.C. Polanco, a political analyst and professor at the University of Mount Saint Vincent. “It’s something that appeals to a large swath of voters. The question is are you authentically working class? Because you can still show empathy without having any idea of what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck.”

Mamdani has hit his own difficult patches with stoking the embers of economic discontent.

His administration’s rollout of a tax on pricey second homes was blasted by critics over the perception the mayor was taking glee from wealth extraction. The publication of a list of potential homeowners who would qualify for the tax led to charges that Mamdani was “doxing” people. And letters sent to longtime New Yorkers asking that they prove they are full-time residents or be hit with the tax has added to the vexation that City Hall was eager to wage class warfare.

Mamdani’s eagerness to tax — motivated by a stated desire to fund government services meant to alleviate the affordability woes facing New Yorkers — is in contrast to his moderate allies and detractors. Hochul, a centrist, resisted calls for broad-based income tax hikes on wealthy people and corporations, though she acquiesced to the second-home tax. The Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter is signaling plans to launch an election-season pressure campaign to get the governor to embrace higher taxes.

The mayor’s own biography — a privileged background that includes a family compound in Uganda, an academic father and an Oscar-winning filmmaker mother — also stands apart from his predecessor, Eric Adams. A former NYPD captain, Adams made many appeals as a mayoral candidate to voters who wear uniforms to work. During his unsuccessful reelection campaign last year, he described himself as a “blue collar” mayor while casting Mamdani as a socialist with a “silver spoon.”

“People at their gut level are aspirational,” said Diane Savino, a former state senator who served as an adviser to Adams. “Nobody wants to think this is as good as it’s going to get. Eric used to talk about the American dream. We’re the only country that has that ideology. That means something to people. If not, why would you want to get out of bed in the morning?”