Claire Valdez, the New York state assemblymember now running to represent New York City’s 7th congressional district in the House of Representatives, joined a union long before she ever entered politics. It’s her history with unions that she credits with giving her the experience she needed to think about running for office in the first place. “I think my perspective as a political person really started with the fact that I was a worker and that I did not control my hours.… And that sense of kind of powerlessness is one that is shared by so much of the working class,” she told me in an interview earlier this year.
That changed when she started work at Columbia University, which was unionized, she said. “My union gave me—it really gave me—time,” she said. She started to use that time to learn about political organizing and think about the way she could help make workers’ lives better. That ultimately led to her race against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, in the congressional primary in June, which she won by more than 20 points. The race was often portrayed as Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who backed her, versus the machine, socialism versus the establishment. But there was another way to frame the battle: the union member versus the political insider.
At least five other candidates are new to national politics this year but are running for seats in the House and Senate because of their experiences with unions. Like Valdez, their rhetoric is worker focused. They believe that their worker-led agenda is key to Democrats winning back some of the disillusioned middle-income voters who have flipped to President Trump or stopped showing up for elections at all. Earning their votes is essential for the Democrats to return to power. But the key question is, assuming the Democrats do return to power, will the presence of these union member legislators result in a governing agenda that really tries to deliver for working people?
First, these candidates have to win in November. Some are running in states and districts where they have an advantage—Valdez is almost certain to win her heavily Democratic New York City district—but others don’t have it so easy.
What the candidates —who include Troy Jackson, a former logger running for Senate in Maine; Bob Brooks, a Pennsylvania firefighter running in the state’s 7th district; Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic and labor leader running as an independent in Nebraska; Sam Forstag, a wildland firefighter and forest worker organizer running for Montana’s 1st congressional district seat; and Brian Poindexter, an ironworker running in Ohio’s competitive 7th district—have in common is that their campaigns promise to truly represent the workers left behind in today’s economy, and especially by the Republicans so many put faith in in 2024.
They are promising that, if elected, they will force a potential Democratic majority to finally deliver on policies the party has promised for years, like increasing wages, lowering the costs of health care, and providing federally guaranteed paid sick days and family leave.
In Maine, Jackson, the former president of the state Senate, rose to the Democratic nomination after Graham Platner’s implosion this summer. While he’s not entirely new to Maine state politics, his campaign leans hard on his history as a fifth-generation logger, and his campaign website shows him in coveralls and a baseball hat standing in front of a yellow bulldozer.
His task is unseating five-term Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins. Collins has tried to have it both ways by portraying herself as an independent who’s not in the Trump MAGA camp while still mostly supporting Trump: That, plus her incumbency, gives her an advantage with independent-minded Maine voters. But the political gods have blessed Jackson with a newly reported scandal from the news outlet ProPublica. Collins was at the center of an FBI probe in which a defense contractor allegedly donated to her 2019 campaign in exchange for contracts. ProPublica reported that Trump stopped the probe when he returned to office.
This plays into Jackson’s case against Collins, which he’s made at least since a Democratic candidate debate in July. “Senator Collins is just a rubber stamp for the wealthy elite in this country, and that is nothing that’s ever going to help the people here in Maine,” Jackson said onstage then.
His campaign has been hammering her over the scandal. But before that, his position as the candidate to help working-class Mainers against Washington insiders may have already been working. Recent polling shows him with a slight edge, though definitely within the margin of error.
All of the other candidates face uphill battles trying to turn red districts blue. In Pennsylvania’s 7th district, Brooks, the firefighter, is trying to overcome a slight Republican advantage to defeat the one-term incumbent Representative Ryan Mackenzie. Cook Political Report rates the contest as a toss-up, and it’s a critical seat for Democrats to win if they want to gain control of the House. Brooks is betting on voter dissatisfaction with the Trump economy. “The number one thing I hear from my neighbors is how unaffordable life has gotten, and that’s what I’m running to fix,” he said in an email. “I’ll fight for universal health care, crack down on private equity buying up our housing, and work to pass the PRO Act so workers have bargaining power again.”
While Democrats have long supported unions and been endorsed by them, rank-and-file union workers have split with leadership over the past few election cycles to sometimes support Republicans, especially Trump, who has made a big show of wearing hard hats and climbing into big rigs to give the appearance of fighting for working Americans. Brooks is trying to push back against that illusion. Like the other candidates, he is speaking like a member who knows how to fight on the workers’ side of the bargaining table.
“I decided to run for Congress because I’ve watched career politicians like Ryan Mackenzie fail the working people of the Lehigh Valley,” Brooks said. “Washington is a dumpster fire, and Mackenzie is the arsonist who helped light it.” Brooks, a firefighter, promises to put it out.
Forstag, the smoke jumper, is running for the Montana seat against Aaron Flint, a combat veteran and radio host. The district leans Republican after shifting toward Democrats this year, according to the Cook Political Report. (The seat is being vacated by Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, who also served as Secretary of the Interior in Trump’s first term and left amid numerous ethics investigations.)
Forstag has been endorsed by Our Revolution, and his district is home to the college town of Missoula, where New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined him for a rally in May. There, he struck a similar tone to Brooks. “If we want to build a country that works for working people, we need to start sending working people to Congress,” he said at the rally.
In Ohio’s 7th, Poindexter, the ironworker, is gaining ground after his R+5 district has moved from a relatively safe seat for Republican Max Miller, who’s faced horrific abuse allegations concerning his ex-wife and daughter, to a toss-up.
Poindexter highlights another critical promise these candidates are making; they say they will support unions, not just working families. “I don’t have to be pro-labor, folks. I am labor,” Poindexter said in July at the North Shore AFL-CIO headquarters in July, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. “My friends, my family—I would not be able to look them in the eye if I went to Washington and forgot where I came from.”
“Working people are tired of politicians who talk about their struggles without having lived them,” an AFL-CIO spokesperson said in a statement, echoing the sentiment. “For too long, the people writing the rules on wages, health care and retirement have no real experience with what those rules mean for the rest of us.”
For Michael Podhorzer, a former political director at the AFL-CIO, the decline of unions helps explain why Democrats have stopped truly representing working people and also stopped getting credit for the policies they do pass. Unions were a trusted intermediary that helped voters connect their daily struggles to the political solutions that could help them; even more critically, they gave working people a true seat at the table.
In a piece published in The Contrarian on Labor Day, Podhorzer wrote: “Today, too many Democratic and media professionals talk about working people the same way that Coca-Cola executives would talk about regaining a prized market segment they’ve lost to Pepsi—which is not the way anyone in a democracy should be talking about its citizens, regardless of their demographic group. That most commentators ask how Democrats can ‘win back’ the working class—not ‘represent’ or ‘answer to’ them—reveals this dynamic in action.”
Even if these candidates win, advancing a worker agenda in Washington will be a tough task. Decades of labor law have tilted the playing field in favor of corporations, and these candidates will have to convince the Democratic Party as a whole that it’s a fight worth taking on, even when there’s so much else to do.
But for them, fighting for unions once in office is a fight that’s critical for the Democrats to take on. “This is a really essential time for people who have familiarity with the labor movement, who have been union members themselves, to step up,” Valdez told me. “Union density is still low, and far too few workers are able to organize with their co-workers … and so I think that’s a really important aspect of the affordability crisis that we talk about a lot.”
