Of the over 250 Democrats serving in the current Congress (counting both the House and the Senate), just twelve (4.6 percent) spent most of their pre-political careers in working-class jobs. Meanwhile, roughly half of American workers hold working-class jobs.

I count a member of Congress as working class only if they spent at least half of their working life in working-class jobs before entering public office. That means jobs like factory work, waiting tables, office support, teaching, nursing, firefighting, and enlisted military service. A summer job or a few years of college shifts doesn’t count. That rules out many Democrats with real but limited working-class history, whose time in those jobs was too short or too uncertain to count.

The ten newcomers who clear that working-class bar mostly won hard-fought, highly competitive races. Indeed, nine of them won or lead in still-uncounted races for seats that Republicans hold today: Brian Poindexter in Ohio’s 7th District; Bob Brooks and Bob Harvie in two Pennsylvania districts; Rebecca Cooke in western Wisconsin; Mitchell Berman in southern Wisconsin; and JoAnna Mendoza, Jake Johnson, and Sam Forstag lead in Arizona, Minnesota, and Montana, respectively. Troy Jackson took a Republican-held Senate seat in Maine. The tenth, Claire Valdez, won an open seat in Brooklyn and Queens, one of the most heavily Democratic districts in the country.

These candidates’ résumés read like a cross section of the American working class:

Many of these working-class candidates are also union members, and several have held union office: Poindexter as an organizer and apprenticeship instructor, Brooks as president of Pennsylvania’s firefighters’ union, Forstag as a vice president of his Forest Service local, and Valdez as a unit chair in the United Auto Workers. They join eleven returning members with similar backgrounds, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former bartender, to Stephen Lynch, the ironworker who ran his union local, and Norma Torres, a former 911 dispatcher.

The working-class Democrats come from a wide range of the party’s caucuses. Among current members, they include Congressional Progressive Caucus stalwarts like Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters, New Democrats like Lucy McBath and John Mannion, and Blue Dog Jared Golden.

The incoming class is just as mixed. Valdez was backed by Justice Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Jackson was Bernie Sanders’s pick. Harvie was endorsed by the New Democrats’ PAC, Johnson and Berman by both the New Democrats and the Blue Dogs. And Poindexter, Brooks, and Forstag managed something that should be impossible under the party’s factional logic: they were endorsed by both the Progressive Caucus PAC and the Blue Dog PAC.

But despite their ideological range, this crop of new working-class Democrats is more progressive on economics than it might at first appear. When I coded the campaign positions of the nine newcomers who ran in swing seats, five came out progressive or leaning progressive, including three the Blue Dogs endorsed. Troy Jackson and Bob Brooks both ran on Medicare for All. Sam Forstag proposed a 5 percent wealth tax on fortunes over $1 billion, Bob Harvie backs the PRO Act and a $15 federal minimum wage, and Brian Poindexter wants to make it easier to join a union and to make the wealthy pay their fair share to shore up Social Security funding. Claire Valdez, who ran in a safe seat in New York City, made Medicare for All one of her three platform pillars, alongside “unions for all” and “housing for all.”

Even the newcomers who lean moderate or show no clear lean hold robust pro-worker positions. Rebecca Cooke supports a $15 minimum wage and expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing. Mitchell Berman calls for a living wage of about $21.54 an hour and joined striking nurses on the picket line. Jake Johnson wants a new top tax bracket for the highest earners and to break up big corporations that exploit workers. JoAnna Mendoza backs the right to unionize and expanding Medicare as well.

Whatever wing of the party they come from, this group’s shared working-class background grounds them in the bread-and-butter, kitchen-table issues that working people care about most and makes them ideal tribunes for working people’s interests on a national stage. They share an experience: of hourly pay, of shift work, of what a health insurance deductible means when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, and of the value of a union contract to families’ financial stability.

Congress has caucuses for nearly every region, industry, and ideological tendency. The Democrats’ main ideological blocs in the House are the Progressive Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition and the Blue Dogs. But Congress doesn’t have a caucus by and for working people, dedicated purely to delivering material gains that improve the lives of ordinary Americans. The Labor Caucus does important work championing workers’ rights on the job and the priorities of the labor movement, from the PRO Act to a higher minimum wage. A working-class caucus would build on that work with a broader vision: raising the standard of living for all working people and making sure every working family has what it takes to thrive. Such a caucus, of course, wouldn’t need to police who does or doesn’t count as working class, but lawmakers with strong working-class backgrounds, who know firsthand the pressures that working families face, would play a central role. That would give working people not only allies in Congress but a voice of their own.

A working-class caucus could do things the existing ones cannot. To start, because working-class lawmakers already sit in caucuses across the party’s ideological spectrum, a working-class caucus could build coalitions across factional lines on bread-and-butter issues like wages, labor law, health care costs, and housing. Each faction supports progress on many of these issues in principle, but an organized bloc would be better placed to push back when party leaders are tempted to let those priorities slide down the agenda. Nick French has made a similar case for the record number of socialists heading to Congress: even a small minority can exert meaningful leverage when it organizes as a bloc.

Second, the issues that shape working people’s daily lives would sit at the top of the caucus’s agenda: making sure a full-time job pays enough to support a family; bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and childcare; protecting retirement security; strengthening workers’ right to organize; and investing in the towns and regions that decades of bad economic policy have left behind.

Finally, there is the bench of future working-class candidates to build. The 2026 results showed that working-class Democrats can win the competitive seats that decide control of the House, and a caucus could recruit, train, and fund more of them, so that a waitress or an electrician thinking about running knows there is a bloc in Washington that wants her to be there.

Organizing twenty or so working-class members of Congress into an organized caucus obviously won’t remake the Democratic Party into a party of the working class on its own. It can’t fix the deeper problem that working people have too little organized power in American politics. But it would give workers more leverage inside the party, because an organized group of pro-worker champions in strategic positions across the party can keep its leadership focused on working people’s priorities and hold the party brass accountable when it strays.