The new
fight over who gets to be ‘working class’
Candidates
are struggling to define who’s struggling in an age of affordability woes.
Mayor
Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su and New York
City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) announce that a core basket of
everyday groceries will be 30 percent cheaper at the five new municipal grocery
stores. The basket will include all fresh produce, meat and seafood, along with
roughly 20 additional categories of pantry staples, dairy and refrigerated
By Nick
Reisman
08/06/2026
05:55 AM EDT
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?”
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