How Blue-Collar Candidates Could Change Politics

Tanya Robinson propped her tablet on a white plastic folding table. It was the day before candidate filing opened for the 2024 elections, and the 38-year-old was still wavering about whether to run for the Ashe County Board of Commissioners. 

Robinson had never been a candidate before—had never even considered the possibility until recently. But she had drafted a stump speech, just in case, and was about to test it before a sympathetic audience of organizers and other would-be candidates from across North Carolina.

“I’m not gonna lie,” she said, adjusting her baseball cap. “I read really fast, so I’m going to try to slow this thing down. I get that little ADHD tick going.”

Robinson has, to put it mildly, an unorthodox political profile. She’s a blunt progressive Democrat in a deep-red mountain county. She last worked as a shift manager for a Pizza Hut. She’s a white woman married to a Black man in a place with almost no racial diversity, and they live with their son in a government-subsidized apartment. She favors flip-flops, nose rings, and T-shirts that broadcast her political sympathies.

Today’s T-shirt featured the logo of Down Home North Carolina, the nonprofit running this two-day candidate training camp. Founded in 2017, Down Home organizes working-class voters in the state’s rural areas and small towns around economic issues like fair wages, safe and affordable housing, and better public-school funding. It has chapters in Ashe and eight other counties, including some of the most difficult places for those issues to get traction, and its work is intentionally multiracial.

Down Home launched a candidate-training program in preparation for this year’s election, covering skills from message development to fundraising. Robinson joined 11 other potential candidates for the inaugural class, which met over a warm December weekend in Durham.

That Sunday morning, they practiced their stump speeches. “I’m a fourth-generation native to Ashe County,” Robinson began. “I’m a mother, a community activist, and have direct and indirect experience with the drug epidemic that our country faces, as a recovered addict and the family member of an addict. I’ve struggled with poverty and food insecurity throughout my life, and I know how to get things done.”

She promised to be different from the current commissioners, five Republican men who voted to support the rights of “the unborn” but rejected a call for minimum housing standards to protect tenants. “I plan to bring fire to the mountain,” Robinson said. “The time has passed for apathetic and jaded reaction to our government.”

The room erupted in whoops. Down Home’s organizers offered praise, followed by advice: themes to emphasize, language to avoid. Isra Allison, the group’s deputy political director, had noticed that when Robinson read aloud, the animation in her voice dissipated. “Just be yourself,” Allison said. “We know you. We know how bombastic you are.”

Both women laughed. “I made it through the whole thing and didn’t use the F-word,” Robinson said. “Y’all should be proud of me.”

That feedback was the affirmation she needed. Robinson drove to the Board of Elections and plunked down her filing fee three days later.

Government By The People

About half the U.S. labor force qualifies as working class: people with manual, service-sector, and clerical jobs. They rarely see themselves reflected in their elected bodies.

People with current or recent working-class jobs make up 1 percent of all state legislators, and 0 percent in North Carolina, according to data compiled by political scientists Nicholas Carnes at Duke University and Eric Hansen at Loyola University Chicago. If you add leaders of unions that represent working-class people, the national figure rises to 1.6 percent. The number is higher for city councils in the United States, but still hovers around 10 percent. A notable outlier is Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a former factory worker and now the Republican candidate for governor.

Nor do working-class voters have a clear champion in either political party. Democrats carried that mantle for much of the 20th century—and, to some degree, still do—in part because of their alliance with organized labor. But that alliance was eroding by 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law. North Carolina’s manufacturing sector cratered after NAFTA, as factories closed and jobs moved to Mexico.

“That was a demarcation point,” said Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Down Home’s senior narrative strategist. “The Democrats started to feel more elite, feel very metropolitan, and [weren’t] talking about bread-and-butter issues.”

The Republican Party didn’t offer much of an alternative: President George H.W. Bush had initiated the push for NAFTA, and GOP policies like corporate tax cuts have redistributed wealth upward. But Republicans have garnered white working-class support by championing conservative social issues and arguing that immigrants threaten blue-collar jobs.

As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump amplified that message and tapped into a growing sense of discouragement among working-class voters. In a Kaiser Family Foundation and CNN poll that year, 68 percent of white people without four-year college degrees said they were dissatisfied with the political influence of people like themselves. Fifty percent predicted their kids would fare worse economically than they did. 

Down Home, with its staff of 40, was founded as an alternative to the white nationalism that was being forged in this crucible. Several grassroots power-building groups, with overlapping missions, emerged in North Carolina during that period, including Siembra NC, which defends the rights of immigrants from Latin America, and Carolina Federation, which organizes against corporate control of government. All three of these organizations work together.

Down Home’s strategy starts with knocking on doors and hosting listening events in the counties where it has chapters. Organizers ask residents what keeps them up at night, whom they hold responsible, and what they think the solutions might be. These questions form the basis of a local chapter’s work.

Once chapter members choose an issue to focus on, they figure out which decision-makers—often county commissioners or town council members—have the power to make change. They recruit allies, do research, and learn how to read budgets. They develop concrete proposals. They contact those decision-makers and show up at public meetings.

When Down Home went into Ashe County, a place hit hard by factory closures, it learned that local leaders were promoting a tourism economy centered around outdoor recreation. Residents said that Airbnb conversions had made it hard to find affordable homes. Much of what remained on the rental market was plagued by leaks, sagging floors, rodents, and mold. In 2023, the Ashe chapter voted on its first issue-based campaign: It would document the problem and lobby the county Board of Commissioners, first in small meetings and then in public, for an enforceable minimum housing code.

These campaigns often prove frustrating, said Frisbie-Fulton. Newly minted activists feel shut down or ignored, and start talking about how their communities need new leaders. “The aha moment for so many folks is, ‘Well, who’s that going to be if it’s not me?’” she said.

Alternatively, organizing victories can inspire political ambition. Down Home’s Granville County chapter successfully lobbied for the restoration of a neglected city park in a Black neighborhood in Oxford, 40 miles north of Raleigh. They researched the town’s finances and discovered it had a budget surplus, along with $2.8 million in unspent American Rescue Plan funding. They knocked on doors and circulated a petition. And they met with town commissioners, who voted unanimously in September 2023 to fund the park. After the victory, three members ran for office, and two of them won: Oxford Mayor Guillermo Nurse and city commissioner Curtis McRae.

Translating ambition into a win is hard. But Carnes, who has studied the issue for 16 years, said that diversifying the economic backgrounds of elected officials makes for substantive policy differences. Local governments pay more attention to the social safety net when they have more working-class representation. At the federal level, working-class members of Congress are more sensitive to how tax cuts, social spending, and occupational safety laws affect working families. 

Carnes analyzed the voting records of U.S. House members from the mid-20th century through 2008. On economic measures, working-class lawmakers voted differently from business owners, farmers, and professionals, often by large margins, even after accounting for other differences. In his most recent analyses, former workers took more progressive positions than other members of their own parties on 10 to 20 percent of important bills. 

This is true regardless of how lawmakers vote on social issues like abortion. “What’s different about them is the precarity of looking into the void,” Carnes said, “of saying, ‘How am I going to pay for health insurance? How am I going to pay for my doctor bill or my rent?’”

‘They Didn’t Live the Lives We’ve Lived’

Precarity was what brought three dozen people to a West Jefferson park in July 2022, when Down Home launched its Ashe County chapter. Tanya Robinson went to the outdoor meeting and listened as others talked about their struggles to pay for medicine and car repairs. “It was stuff that I could easily identify with,” she said.

When she was a child, Robinson’s father supported the family by driving dump trucks. It wasn’t a secure living: One winter, she said, the family couldn’t afford propane to heat their mobile home, so they dragged their mattresses into the living room and slept in front of the fireplace. She graduated high school, but lacked money to continue her education until her grandfather in Virginia offered to pay for community college. She went to school whenever she could and helped her grandfather run his convenience store and towing business. She spent most of the next 16 years away, and by her early 30s was selling insurance. It paid well, but she hated making scripted calls all day.

“The aha moment for so many folks is, ‘Well, who’s that going to be if it’s not me?’”

Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Down Home North Carolina

She was the fortunate sibling. Her younger brother, TJ, struggled with an addiction to methamphetamines and heroin, and his adult life became a cycle of incarceration, hospitalization, recovery, and relapse. Some of his friends had died from overdoses, and she worried her brother would be next.

In 2019, Robinson moved back to Ashe, which borders Virginia and Tennessee in the state’s northwest corner, after her father was diagnosed with cancer. Her husband and their son joined her. Even with a business degree from a for-profit university, the only work she could find was an $8-an-hour job at a convenience store. After a few weeks she quit and took the Pizza Hut job. She left that job in August 2020. Now her husband, who is in his 60s, supports the family with his construction work and Social Security.

Robinson threw herself into the Ashe chapter’s first campaign, which entailed visiting tenants and researching housing conditions before presenting a plan to the commissioners. One apartment had cockroaches and black mold, she said, and the leaking bathroom fixtures left the walls soft to the touch. “This woman was on oxygen 24/7,” Robinson said. “Her kid had breathing problems. And they’re living in this home because there’s nowhere else for them to go.”

The chapter, which has 34 dues-paying members, put together a data-heavy slide deck calling for a minimum housing code. They requested time before the Ashe County Board of Commissioners and got on the agenda in October 2023. Robinson, who had little public speaking experience, joined a tag team of presenters. “The rent prices being paid for homes here in Ashe easily support timely maintenance and repair,” she told the commissioners. “The county needs to take accountability.”

“This all sounds well and good,” commissioner Mike Eldreth said after the presentation. But like most of the board, he opposed minimum standards. Fixing up houses, he said, could mean evicting existing tenants. “If you remove every person that’s in a substandard house, we’re going to have hundreds, maybe thousands of homeless people,” he said. “That’s a worse problem, being out in the woods.”

The rebuff hurt, but was unsurprising to Robinson. “They can’t identify with our issues, because they didn’t live the lives we’ve lived,” she said. “That told me: You’ve got to be the one to step up and represent the people that aren’t being heard.”

This is a rare leap. Carnes, the Duke political scientist, has studied why so few elected positions are filled by working-class people like Robinson. It’s not about electability, he said.

Carnes and Noam Lupu, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, examined survey data from 1,000 Americans who, in 2015, were asked to compare hypothetical political candidates. Factory workers fared about 2 percentage points better than business owners in these matchups, though the difference was not statistically significant. “[Voters] tend to perceive politicians from working-class jobs as maybe having a little less competence, but a little more warmth or concern for their problems,” Carnes said. “The two things kind of wash out in the end.”

“They can’t identify with our issues, because they didn’t live the lives we’ve lived.”

Tanya Robinson, candidate for Ashe County Board of Commissioners 

But people with manual, clerical, and service jobs are less likely to run in the first place. They have less flexibility to rearrange their work schedules or take off time. They can’t quit. They have less room for risk. And their jobs are physically and mentally demanding. “At the end of the day, you’re just more tired, and you don’t have four hours of good energy to go out and campaign,” Carnes said.

They also tend to lack the support of party leaders, who can help new candidates overcome these barriers, but who are primarily interested in viability. “If a worker has even a 5 percent lower chance of winning, they might say, ‘Hey, elections are won and lost by 5 percent. I’m going to go with the other qualified person I know, who’s an attorney, who I think will have an easier time,’” Carnes said.

There are a number of correctives for this, which vary by level of pragmatism, said Carnes. At the “pie in the sky” end are state-funded political scholarships, which would help candidates leave their jobs temporarily and keep the lights on. (These could be paired with laws requiring their employers to rehire them.) Given the public distaste for a government solution, Carnes would like to see advocacy groups and political parties step up their recruitment, training, and support of working-class candidates. 

‘This Is Who I Am’

At Down Home’s chapter office in Alamance County last year, a list of 2024 races hung on the wall. A member named Tameka Harvey eyed one of the races: the Alamance-Burlington Board of Education. “That’s gonna be me,” she recalled saying aloud.

“For real, Tameka?” asked Allison, the deputy political director.

 “Yeah, that’s gonna be me,” she said.

The Alamance-Burlington schools were familiar ground for Harvey, a 42-year-old single mother. She was putting three kids through high school: two of her own, plus one of her brother’s. Her son and nephew both have disabilities that required relentless advocacy on her part. An administrator once wanted to send her son, who has ADHD, to an alternative school because of behavioral issues, she said. “You recommend whatever you want,” she remembered telling him, “and I’ll fight you to the end.”

She became more vocal in 2023, when mold was found in many of Alamance’s school buildings. On TV, Harvey cut a relatable figure, protective but not abrasive. She was trying to give her children the champion she had lacked: Her mother had been addicted to crack cocaine, she said, and she spent much of her childhood shunted between relatives. At 18, she became her younger brother’s guardian. “I know what it’s like when no one speaks up for you,” she said.

Being an advocate becomes harder, though, when you’re also the sole breadwinner. At the start of the pandemic, Harvey was working at a supermarket, scrambling to meet the surge in online orders. “I probably worked, God, 60 hours a week,” she said. She woke her children before leaving home, and trusted them to navigate their remote classes alone. Often she got home at 8 or 9 p.m. In 2021, Harvey developed long COVID, left work, and began collecting disability.

Harvey’s interest in running came as Down Home was gearing up its candidate recruitment and training efforts. Even before the December candidate camp, it asked its members to identify potential candidates—working-class or otherwise, inside or outside the organization—who would represent their values. Then organizers reached out to those people. Some were already exploring runs; others had never considered the possibility.

“The first barrier is just having the conversation that you can run,” said Vicente Cortez, Down Home’s political director. “We live in a system that teaches us that if you are not wealthy, or if you have not gone to an elite four-year institution, that somehow you’re just not qualified to govern.” Those who expressed interest received invitations to the Durham candidate camp.

Twelve accepted, and nine eventually decided to run: eight registered Democrats and one unaffiliated voter. Down Home itself is nonpartisan, and while its values align with many progressive Democrats, it focuses primarily on economic issues and has endorsed candidates from both parties. “Most people where we organize, they don’t consider themselves Democrats or Republicans,” said Cortez. “They just want a government that works for them, and they want to have their own liberties and be left alone. And whatever candidate knocks the door first really matters. … We’re trying to get to the door first.”

That weekend, Harvey met others who shared her ambition, including Robinson. They sat through two days of back-to-back lessons on understanding the electorate, building a staff and volunteer squad, scheduling their time, setting a budget, raising money, crafting a message, using social media, and complying with election law. They soaked up the information as best they could: Once they declared their candidacies, Down Home could no longer coordinate with their campaigns because of its tax status. The nonprofit could only campaign for them independently.

“We live in a system that teaches us that if you are not wealthy, or if you have not gone to an elite four-year institution, that somehow you’re just not qualified to govern.”

Vicente Cortez, Down Home’s political director

When it came time to deliver her stump speech, Harvey started reading her prepared remarks. Then she laid down the page and spoke extemporaneously. “Society will throw us away the moment things begin to happen,” she said. “Society says, ‘They’re not going to make it.’ But I’m here.” The room applauded. 

Robinson, who was standing beside Harvey, rapped on the table in support. “I was trying to hold back the tears over here, because my story is true,” Harvey continued. “This is who I am, and so I will always fight for our children.”

After Harvey was done, Robinson folded her in a hug.

Opening Doors

On a hot Saturday afternoon in June, ’80s music filled a downtown picnic shelter in the Ashe County town of West Jefferson. The stone grill sizzled with burgers and hot dogs. Robinson, now seven months into her campaign, had billed the gathering as an “Everybody Vote” party, and suggested a $5-a-plate donation.

Robinson didn’t have a primary. Three Democrats—all Down Home members, all women—had filed for the three open at-large seats on the Board of Commissioners. Still, the race had proven exhausting so far. “As a mother and a wife, there’s just never enough hours in a day, between cleaning and campaigning and taking phone calls and meetings and appearances,” she said. And that’s without a full-time job: If Robinson were still working at Pizza Hut, she said, there’s no way she could compete with a paid staff of zero.

There was also chaos in her personal life. In mid-May, Robinson’s brother died from a drug overdose. TJ was 34, and had been living with his mother, who had left the house to get a haircut. When she returned, TJ was slumped on the couch with a needle in his arm. 

Robinson didn’t attend the memorial service. “I don’t want to remember him like that,” she said. “And I don’t want my kid to remember him like that.”

Then, two weeks later, Robinson was arrested at the West Jefferson Walmart, where she had paid her electric bill, purchased a money order, and bought groceries using the self-checkout. She was charged with a felony count of obtaining property by false pretenses. According to the magistrate’s order, Robinson was allegedly “pretending to scan items when in fact not scanning them and having a Walmart attendant remove items from the receipt and then placing them in the bag as if she purchased them.”

Robinson was bewildered by the accusation. She had just spent $474 at Walmart, according to receipts she provided to The Assembly. And she had worked with the employee, she said, to resolve a problem with the scanner. The arrest, she said, felt “soul crushing.”

The only explanation Robinson could summon was that the arrest was payback. She had leveled stinging critiques of Ashe County Republicans over issues like drug-treatment policy, law enforcement, housing, and economic development. While the West Jefferson police department doesn’t fall under county government, it’s still part of the local power structure. “A hit dog will holler every time,” she said. “They don’t like the fact that I’m making waves.”

West Jefferson Police Chief Bradley Jordan, who was at the scene, has known Robinson since childhood. He called her a “good person” and noted that she offered to pay for the groceries that didn’t get scanned. (Walmart accepted.) Jordan, a Republican, denied that anyone in his department targeted the candidate, and said his officers were just responding to a complaint from Walmart. “I’ll let the judge do the judging,” the chief said. “I hope she’s found innocent.” The case is scheduled to go to court July 18.

Amidst this, the campaign cookout was a blessed moment of normalcy. Supporters bought her T-shirts, which said, “Vote like your future depends on it!!!!!” A friend brought handpicked blueberries. Grown women staged shootouts with dime-store water guns. By afternoon’s end, the playlist had switched from ’80s to ’90s, and Robinson had raised $420, almost twice the cost of the food.

The campaign would continue. Victory was unlikely; one of Robinson’s running mates, Nancy Beth Weaver, had acknowledged to The Wall Street Journal that, as an Ashe County Democrat, she didn’t stand a “snowball’s chance in hell” of winning. But for Robinson, the opportunity to raise issues like drug abuse, and get listened to, made the race worth running.

Harvey didn’t have a primary either. Candidates for the Alamance-Burlington Board of Education run without party labels, and eight candidates are competing for four at-large seats.

By June, Harvey had developed a powerful, preacherly stump style, driven by conviction and assisted by her high-school theater experience. She spoke with her full body, and without written notes.

That month she visited a brewery in downtown Graham, where the Alamance County Democrats’ LGBTQ caucus was meeting with candidates. The caucus members skewed older, and they offered her a warm reception, but it was quieter than the music that thrummed in from the adjacent taproom.

“If this is the energy that you’re going to bring on November 5,” Harvey told the room when it was her turn to speak, “we’re not going to win anything.”

The Democrats snapped to attention. Harvey evoked the prospect of a blue victory in Alamance County. The cheers grew louder.

Then she returned to her core message: Alamance’s most vulnerable students need champions. “I tell our principals in our schools: you want to connect with your kids, understand what they went through last night,” she said. “Ask them, did they eat dinner last night? Ask them, do they have clean clothes when they walk in your school?”

For all her passion and personal experience, Harvey knows how long the odds are. The county looks equally split on paper: 32 percent Democratic, 32 percent Republican, 35 unaffiliated. But the seven-member Board of Education has only one registered Democrat. Alamance’s sheriff is Republican, and so is the entire Board of Commissioners. The last Democratic presidential candidate to carry Alamance was Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Still, she has faith. “I don’t know that it’s God’s desire for me to be on the school board,” she said. “But what I do know is that if the door is not open for me for the school board, there’s something else. I don’t know what, but I know that there is something else there. And I’m ready.”