Organized labor’s political power has declined dramatically over the past half century. Union density has fallen from more than 30% of the workforce in the 1960s to less than 10% today — and labor’s footprint in campaign finance has shrunk in parallel. Meanwhile, the historic bond between unions and working-class voters has frayed. In 2024, more than 40% of unionized workers reported voting for Donald Trump, and Teamsters president Sean O’Brien’s appearance at the Republican National Convention made the depth of this realignment impossible to ignore.

Unions have responded with a wide range of revitalization strategies: ballot initiatives, new worker organizations, labor-aligned third parties. Yet one promising approach has received surprisingly little attention — the deliberate recruitment, preparation, and election of candidates who come from the labor movement itself.

This report argues that union candidates are an untapped political resource. Using original quantitative analysis of congressional candidate data from 2010 to 2022 — drawn from the Center for Working-Class Politics’ database of candidate websites — alongside 20 in-depth interviews with union-affiliated elected officials and labor leaders, it documents what union candidates do differently, how rarely they run, and what unions can do to change that.