The 2026 midterms were a referendum on President Trump’s economy, but anyone who says that means only gas and grocery prices has misread the mood. From data centers to the Trump family raking in billions to the corruption at the center of the ballroom construction site Trump spoke from, the day after the election, the results were a rejection of the idea that billionaires and the companies they run can do anything they want and can pay politicians to do anything they want. Voters didn’t just want to go back to the pre-Trump status quo: They wanted to see a real change in the political economy of this country.
You can see that in progressive victories up and down the ballot across the country, including in the election of rank-and-file union members, not the lawyers or political nepobabies or children of wealth who usually occupy such seats.
“I think you know historically unions have backed Democrats and Republicans for a long time across the country,” said Nedia Dominguez, executive director of Organized Power in Numbers, a group that helped plan May Day demonstrations around the country this year. “But being backed by workers and then being a worker yourself is not the same thing.… They don’t need a staffer to give them a talking point about the power that it is to have a union and have collective power as a worker. That’s powerful.”
Of at least 17 union members likely to be sworn in as Democrats in Congress next year, 13 turned red districts blue. In Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district, for example, firefighter Bob Brooks beat incumbent Republican Ryan Mackenzie by 12 points. “I’ve spoken with people across the Lehigh Valley throughout this campaign who are playing the game the best they can,” he said at his victory speech. “Working hard, punching the clock, doing everything right, and they’re still struggling to get ahead or just get by. They’re sick and tired of waking up every day and getting kicked in the teeth by a broken political system that has left them behind.”
He went through the laundry list of financial burdens crushing working families, but he didn’t just promise relief. He promised a change. “We aren’t going down there to try and piece things back together the way they were before,” he said. “We’re going down there to shake up the status quo, fight for working people, stop the bullshit, and build something better from the ashes.”
Across the border in Ohio, another union member, ironworker Brian Poindexter, beat Republican incumbent Max Miller in his 7th congressional district race. But the Rust Belt won’t be the only region to send workers and union members to Congress next year. New York State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, who joined a union when she started working for Columbia University and has said her union work helped get her into politics, carried New York’s heavily Democratic 7th district with more than 83 percent of the vote. Rebecca Cooke, a waitress and small-business owner who grew up on a dairy farm and started a nonprofit to help women entrepreneurs, is projected to win Wisconsin’s 3rd congressional district by just over six points, defeating an extremely MAGA opponent. Trump won her district all three times he ran for president. In Texas’s 23rd district, which encompasses Uvalde, site of a tragic 2022 school shooting, former public school teacher Katy Padilla Stout is projected to win by eight points. Former smoke jumper Sam Forstag is also projected to win Montana’s new 1st congressional district by three points.
And, of course, in the closely watched Texas and Michigan Senate races, James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed were once union members. In Maine, fifth-generation logger Troy Jackson ended Republican Susan Collins’s three-decade career in Washington, D.C., likely defeating her by seven points. “If you’re watching this after getting home from a shift or sitting at the table wondering how you’re going to pay the next bill, I want you to hear something very clearly,” he said in his victory speech. “You are sending somebody to Washington who knows exactly what that feels like.”
These working people also owe their victories to working people. Democrats won union and nonunion households alike, but they won households with at least two members overwhelmingly, 64 to 34 percent, according to exit polls. The party won every income level, including households making under $50,000 a year by 57 to 41 percent. When it comes to the education divide, the only group Republicans won a majority of were voters who had only a high school education. It was also a win for representation: About half the country is working class, but only 5 percent of members of Congress are.
As Brooks said, they ran not just to get things done—they ran to shake up the system, and the Democratic Party.
What all of these candidates have in common is that they promised to use their union histories to fight for working people in Washington. They said during their campaigns they want to raise wages and make health care more affordable for families. What helping working families means beyond that, exactly, may vary a bit. Valdez is a college-educated progressive in far-left New York City, while other members of this new working-people coalition are representing more moderate districts.
There’s some evidence their backgrounds will make a difference. “Working-class people face significant hurdles running for office, but when they win, they vote in more pro-worker ways than their upper-class counterparts, and use the rhetoric to match it,” said Todd Tucker, director of the industrial policy and trade program at the Roosevelt Institute. If they want to draft good policies, they should focus on hiring staff with the same priorities, he added.
The new union members will also be part of the larger Democratic Party that must decide how its new majorities—at least 54 seats in the Senate and 245 in the House, but with more wins possible—will govern. House Minority Leader and soon-to-be first Black House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries made conciliatory noises on Morning Joe Wednesday, promising to concentrate on affordability. But CNN is reporting that those close to him say he plans to go after CEOs and tax the rich, promising a new era of populism. “The American people are rightly frustrated. They want disruption, they want dramatic change,” Jeffries told CNN.
On that score, he is right. In almost every cycle since the Trump era began in 2016, voters have chosen change, even voting for Trump when they didn’t like or agree with him in 2024, in part because he kept promising to dismantle the system. The system they want dismantled is the one that feels unfair, the one that makes the American dream a broken promise, whoever is trying to achieve it and wherever they live.
Anger about the fundamental unfairness of the economy has been building for years, but voters have been dissatisfied with both parties on their ability to deliver. That’s where next year needs to be different if the Democratic Party wants to use its majority to make working people’s lives better.
There are a lot of policies that could help working people that Democrats have long said they support—like increasing the minimum wage and making it easier to join a union—that they’ve yet to get over the finish line, especially to improve wages. The new working-class members of Congress could make these policies priorities. “Wages are very real to them, and I do think there has been a lack of like real awareness that wages are part of the affordability equation,” said Celine McNicholas, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C.
The fact that these elected officials were in unions also means that they are used to organizing and working with other workers, said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard University School of Law. “Being in a union is a collective activity,” she said. “They are engaged with working people in a way that probably a lot of members of Congress don’t regularly.” Enhancing workers’ ability to join unions would also potentially increase the pool of union members who jump into elected office in the future.
There are changes set to happen next year, like reductions in Medicaid coverage and increases in health care premiums, that will need to be addressed as soon as possible. There are long-term increases in caregiving and education costs, too often left out of affordability discussions, but which people who are used to stretching a paycheck know are more immediate problems to be addressed.
Voters see these not as disparate evils, but a result of the overarching concentration of power at the top. “This is not just about us, like having a sort of silver-bullet policy or one thing, but we need to shift the dynamics of power and unionization and easing the path toward organizing workplaces as a way to really get at those deep structures of power,” said Kate Bahn, the chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “So when we take trends like AI being integrated into workplaces, or rising health care costs, and things like that, unions shape those dynamics, and so even if it’s like a policy area outside of just labor law, having the presence of unions really changes those things.”
Mike Pierce, the executive director of Protect Borrowers, also pointed to Talarico’s Senate campaign in Texas, during which he spoke about what it was like when he was younger and struggling with debt, including medical and student loan debt. As a result, he’s supported debt relief and been critical of big credit card companies and banks, he said. “Moving beyond labor priorities, there are economic priorities that these lawmakers share, along with this generation of economic populists that just got swept in, that’s everything from checking concentrated corporate power by taxing billionaires and big corporations,” Pierce said.
Nedia Dominguez pointed out that voters also want to see Democrats walk and chew gum at the same time. “People are really angry and really mad and really hurt because they’ve watched their neighbors be murdered by ICE or be kidnapped in the middle of the night,” she said. “Those are real, regular people that other regular working-class people know as their neighbors or co-workers, and so I also do think that people do expect Congress to hold this administration accountable.”
The blue wave this year was so big it likely swept up even more working-class candidates than were on the national radar, and it could create a Democratic Party with a mandate for big, structural change. The party also has to regain trust. McNicholas pointed out that next year will be the twentieth anniversary of when the current federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, was set. “You cannot ignore issues like a right to a union, basic standards like minimum wage,” she said. “Those can’t go decades and decades without any attention. That is political negligence.”
If Democrats don’t deliver, voters will want change again in two years. “The multiracial working class in this country has delivered for them,” Dominguez said. “They have to be cautious to not assume or see that as like, ‘Oh, finally the multiracial working-class is coming home to the Democrats.’ But rather, they’re voting for themselves and their neighbors and their co-workers, and they’re giving you a chance to do better than the other guys. But you better deliver.”
