How Blue-Collar Candidates Could Change Politics

An upstart effort to get more working-class people to run for political office is taking root in Ashe and Alamance counties in North Carolina. This story is co-published with The Assembly as part of a new content partnership with Spotlight.

Tanya Robinson propped her tablet on a white plastic folding table. It was the day before candidate filing opened for the 2024 elections, and the 38-year-old was still wavering about whether to run for the Ashe County Board of Commissioners.

Robinson had never been a candidate before—had never even considered the possibility until recently. But she had drafted a stump speech, just in case, and was about to test it before a sympathetic audience of organizers and other would-be candidates from across North Carolina.

“I’m not gonna lie,” she said, adjusting her baseball cap. “I read really fast, so I’m going to try to slow this thing down. I get that little ADHD tick going.”

Robinson has, to put it mildly, an unorthodox political profile. She’s a blunt progressive Democrat in a deep-red mountain county. She last worked as a shift manager for a Pizza Hut. She’s a white woman married to a Black man in a place with almost no racial diversity, and they live with their son in a government-subsidized apartment. She favors flip-flops, nose rings, and T-shirts that broadcast her political sympathies.

Today’s T-shirt featured the logo of Down Home North Carolina, the nonprofit running this two-day candidate training camp. Founded in 2017, Down Home organizes working-class voters in the state’s rural areas and small towns around economic issues like fair wages, safe and affordable housing, and better public-school funding. It has chapters in Ashe and eight other counties, including some of the most difficult places for those issues to get traction, and its work is intentionally multiracial.

Down Home launched a candidate-training program in preparation for this year’s election, covering skills from message development to fundraising. Robinson joined 11 other potential candidates for the inaugural class, which met over a warm December weekend in Durham.

That Sunday morning, they practiced their stump speeches. “I’m a fourth-generation native to Ashe County,” Robinson began. “I’m a mother, a community activist, and have direct and indirect experience with the drug epidemic that our country faces, as a recovered addict and the family member of an addict. I’ve struggled with poverty and food insecurity throughout my life, and I know how to get things done.”

She promised to be different from the current commissioners, five Republican men who voted to support the rights of “the unborn” but rejected a call for minimum housing standards to protect tenants. “I plan to bring fire to the mountain,” Robinson said. “The time has passed for apathetic and jaded reaction to our government.”

The room erupted in whoops. Down Home’s organizers offered praise, followed by advice: themes to emphasize, language to avoid. Isra Allison, the group’s deputy political director, had noticed that when Robinson read aloud, the animation in her voice dissipated. “Just be yourself,” Allison said. “We know you. We know how bombastic you are.”

Both women laughed. “I made it through the whole thing and didn’t use the F-word,” Robinson said. “Y’all should be proud of me.”

That feedback was the affirmation she needed. Robinson drove to the Board of Elections and plunked down her filing fee three days later.

Government By The People

About half the U.S. labor force qualifies as working class: people with manual, service-sector, and clerical jobs. They rarely see themselves reflected in their elected bodies.

People with current or recent working-class jobs make up 1 percent of all state legislators, and 0 percent in North Carolina, according to data compiled by political scientists Nicholas Carnes at Duke University and Eric Hansen at Loyola University Chicago. If you add leaders of unions that represent working-class people, the national figure rises to 1.6 percent. The number is higher for city councils in the United States, but still hovers around 10 percent. A notable outlier is Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a former factory worker and now the Republican candidate for governor.

Nor do working-class voters have a clear champion in either political party. Democrats carried that mantle for much of the 20th century—and, to some degree, still do—in part because of their alliance with organized labor. But that alliance was eroding by 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law. North Carolina’s manufacturing sector cratered after NAFTA, as factories closed and jobs moved to Mexico.

“That was a demarcation point,” said Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Down Home’s senior narrative strategist. “The Democrats started to feel more elite, feel very metropolitan, and [weren’t] talking about bread-and-butter issues.”

The Republican Party didn’t offer much of an alternative: President George H.W. Bush had initiated the push for NAFTA, and GOP policies like corporate tax cuts have redistributed wealth upward. But Republicans have garnered white working-class support by championing conservative social issues and arguing that immigrants threaten blue-collar jobs.

As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump amplified that message and tapped into a growing sense of discouragement among working-class voters. In a Kaiser Family Foundation and CNN poll that year, 68 percent of white people without four-year college degrees said they were dissatisfied with the political influence of people like themselves. Fifty percent predicted their kids would fare worse economically than they did.

Down Home, with its staff of 40, was founded as an alternative to the white nationalism that was being forged in this crucible. Several grassroots power-building groups, with overlapping missions, emerged in North Carolina during that period, including Siembra NC, which defends the rights of immigrants from Latin America, and Carolina Federation, which organizes against corporate control of government. All three of these organizations work together.

Down Home’s strategy starts with knocking on doors and hosting listening events in the counties where it has chapters. Organizers ask residents what keeps them up at night, whom they hold responsible, and what they think the solutions might be. These questions form the basis of a local chapter’s work.

Once chapter members choose an issue to focus on, they figure out which decision-makers—often county commissioners or town council members—have the power to make change. They recruit allies, do research, and learn how to read budgets. They develop concrete proposals. They contact those decision-makers and show up at public meetings.

When Down Home went into Ashe County, a place hit hard by factory closures, it learned that local leaders were promoting a tourism economy centered around outdoor recreation. Residents said that Airbnb conversions had made it hard to find affordable homes. Much of what remained on the rental market was plagued by leaks, sagging floors, rodents, and mold. In 2023, the Ashe chapter voted on its first issue-based campaign: It would document the problem and lobby the county Board of Commissioners, first in small meetings and then in public, for an enforceable minimum housing code.

These campaigns often prove frustrating, said Frisbie-Fulton. Newly minted activists feel shut down or ignored, and start talking about how their communities need new leaders. “The aha moment for so many folks is, ‘Well, who’s that going to be if it’s not me?’” she said.

Alternatively, organizing victories can inspire political ambition. Down Home’s Granville County chapter successfully lobbied for the restoration of a neglected city park in a Black neighborhood in Oxford, 40 miles north of Raleigh. They researched the town’s finances and discovered it had a budget surplus, along with $2.8 million in unspent American Rescue Plan funding. They knocked on doors and circulated a petition. And they met with town commissioners, who voted unanimously in September 2023 to fund the park. After the victory, three members ran for office, and two of them won: Oxford Mayor Guillermo Nurse and city commissioner Curtis McRae.

Translating ambition into a win is hard. But Carnes, who has studied the issue for 16 years, said that diversifying the economic backgrounds of elected officials makes for substantive policy differences. Local governments pay more attention to the social safety net when they have more working-class representation. At the federal level, working-class members of Congress are more sensitive to how tax cuts, social spending, and occupational safety laws affect working families.