In 1992, West Virginia was one of the country’s “bluest” states, while Democratic victory in Connecticut — today very much one of the bluest — was hardly assured. This was not a product of the unusual three-way contest that year between Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ross Perot. Nor was it due to Clinton’s personal charisma and Southern roots. Four years prior, when Bush faced off against the stiff and technocratic Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, West Virginia was one of a handful of states that went blue, while Connecticut went red by a comfortable margin.

West Virginia and Connecticut are object lessons for what has since become of American politics in Les Leopold’s latest book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power. In the last few decades, Democrats have lost considerable ground with working-class voters and in struggling regions across the country, but they have built new strongholds in communities and states that have come out ahead in a new “postindustrial” economy.

Leopold is well positioned to wade into the debate about what this means for unions’ political strategy. He is the executive director of the Labor Institute and the author of the The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor (2007), a rich biography of one of the late twentieth century’s great but mostly unsung union leaders, Tony Mazzocchi. But Leopold’s newest work is not an account of how we got to this point (for that, check out his Wall Street’s War on Workers [2024], as well as my work in Catalyst). Instead, Leopold dedicates the bulk of We Need a Party of Our Own to what labor activists, unions, and other progressives should do to escape from the Democrats’ toxic brand. He makes a serious and convincing case for why labor should join the electoral battle by running candidates in general elections as independents, and how this could pave the way to building a new third party — a relatively rare argument these days.