There’s Brian Poindexter, the ironworker from Ohio. There’s Troy Jackson, the lumberjack from Maine. Rebecca Cooke, the waitress from Wisconsin, and Bob Brooks, the firefighter from Pennsylvania.
A slew of Democratic challengers are emphasizing their working-class experience in the 2026 election cycle, giving lie to the stereotype of Democrats as out-of-touch elitists who don’t understand the problems of average Americans.
And while there may not be overwhelming agreement on who exactly is in the American working class, it’s clear that the group is much more diverse than it has been in generations past. But the current crop of candidates will need to persuade voters who are wary of institutions in general, and of politicians in particular.
“I actually think rural voters and many working class communities are quite used to liberal, progressive politicians coming in to their community and throwing on a Carhartt jacket or yucking up at the union hall,” said Nicholas Jacobs, director of Colby College’s Public Policy Lab and co-author of the 2024 book The Rural Voter. “And then as soon as that candidate leaves, everybody turns to one another and goes, ‘what the hell was that?’”
Jacobs says the distrust that many people who identify as working-class have toward Democrats can usually be traced to a few specific causes, like the 2008 financial crisis, deindustrialization and the opioid crisis.
That’s led to the authenticity problem politicians have among voters, who have become accustomed to hearing campaign promises that don’t come to fruition. An August Politico poll found that 59 percent of people in both parties who self-identified as working class said politicians only promised to help them in order to win votes.
“I think it's an open question whether rural communities or working class voters are going to see many of the candidates up on the stage this time around as authentic,” Jacobs said. He’s intrigued by the idea that “authenticity” to voters requires a candidate to have really deep roots in a place.
“And that’s Sherrod Brown’s distinction,” he said of the former Ohio Senator who’s running for another term. “Nobody doubts that he's been around and been delivering this line for a long time.”
Jacobs also thinks a perceived lack of authenticity may have ultimately hurt former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner in the general election. “He was picked straight out of central casting by an outside group that had a very specific understanding of how politics works and how style and how narrative can be combined to get people to embrace a certain progressive platform,” Jacobs said. “And, I don't know if many people outside of Portland had ever heard of an oyster farmer before.”
Focus on affordability
There are differences among the Democrats running to unseat Republicans in the House and Senate, but Jacobs says he thinks the “working class” throughline is part of a larger strategy.
“I think this move to embrace a working class ethos or to prop up candidates who can more authentically speak to a working class background is deliberate — to the extent that anything in party politics can be controlled by anyone,” he said. “It’s not just the organic emergence of candidates who are sick of the status quo and find themselves drifting toward Democratic politics.”
Voters repeatedly emphasize affordability as the issue they’re most worried about as the midterms approach, and working-class candidates this cycle are keeping the issue front and center in their talking points and on their websites, where they highlight their own life experiences.
Brian Poindexter is seeking to unseat Republican Max Miller in Ohio’s 7th Congressional district. Poindexter’s website features a photo of him wearing a hard hat adorned with union stickers. His “about” page is titled “Brian’s working class story,” and mentions he’s the son of a stay-at-home mom and a union machinist, and that he’s been working since he was 15: “he would work the 7-to-11 shift every night after school and put in double shifts on weekends.”
Bob Brooks is running against first-term Congressman Ryan Mackenzie in Pennsylvania’s 7th District. His campaign site features a photo of him on a Bobcat skid-steer loader on his website, part of his landscaping business. It mentions he was “raised primarily by a single mom who worked as a bartender to keep food on the table,” and that he’s held many service jobs. “Bob loves working, but has seen too many of his friends work too many shifts to keep up with rising costs.”
Rebecca Cooke is challenging Rep. Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin's 3rd District. A small-business owner, she mentions on her website that she paid her way through college with “Pell Grants, work-study jobs, and long shifts as a waitress,” and still takes waitressing shifts at a local restaurant: “Because she grew up on a dairy farm, she knows that being successful means wearing multiple hats, and she’s proud of it.”
Troy Jackson replaced Platner as Democratic nominee for Senate, challenging five-term Sen. Susan Collins in Maine. A logger in a family of loggers, Jackson is a former state senator, and says on his website he’s “tired of watching working families get squeezed while the wealthiest keep getting more.”
Working-class Democrats are all quick to highlight their labor union bona fides — and Brown notes on his website that he and his wife both drive “Jeeps made by union workers in Toledo.”
But Jacobs suggests that union membership isn’t necessarily exclusive to the blue-collar working class in 2026 outside of Rust Belt states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. And he notes that in states like Maine, most unionized people work in the public sector, not manufacturing.
“I just read something that the [United Auto Workers] has more graduate students on its rolls than auto workers in Michigan,” he said. “That's one of the ways in which we get working class politics wrong is we still rely on that old heuristic of union membership and the old union hall to make sense of it. In some places it might be true, but I'm less convinced that it's helpful nationwide.”
Whether the working-class Democrat of 2026 will have lessons for candidates in 2028 and beyond is still unclear, Jacobs says, as midterm candidates seem to be styling themselves as wanting to move beyond just attacking Donald Trump and toward finding solutions to voters’ problems. Many Americans are feeling politically homeless as the country becomes more polarized, he added, and are just looking for fixes to basic problems, rather than the massive changes each party may be proposing.
“At the end of the day, party labels matter, and positions matter, gas prices matter,” he said. “But most people, when they show up and they vote for someone, they will tell you they are voting for a person. And they have to feel like they know that person. ”
(Photo: Brian Poindexter, via Brian Poindexter for Congress Facebook)