Few Elected Officials Come Directly from the Working Class

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences:

In the United States, about half of all jobs are working-class jobs: manual-labor jobs like construction worker, service-industry jobs like home health care worker, clerical jobs like receptionist, and informal-sector jobs like day laborer. These jobs are held by men and women, young and old, from every race and religion, across every part of the country. (For more on how researchers define working class, see the Frequently Asked Questions section at the end of the report.) Working-class jobs are occupations that don’t provide employees with much material security, that don’t require capital or extensive formal education, and that don’t give employees much autonomy. These working-class jobs are indispensable to the economy and to our society: modern life in the United States is unthinkable without the people who pave roads, repair electrical lines, style hair, move freight, work in factories, deliver packages, stock shelves, build houses, repair cars, clean hotel rooms, answer phones, dig trenches, cook and serve food in restaurants, clean hospitals, ring up groceries, fix potholes, and empty garbage.

Although working-class jobs are essential to our way of life, people from working-class jobs almost never go on to hold elected political office. A 2013 study found that working-class jobs made up 52 percent of the labor force, but fewer than 10 percent of city council members had working-class jobs, fewer than 3 percent of state legislators held or had come from working-class jobs, and the typical member of Congress had spent less than 2 percent of their entire precongressional career doing the kinds of jobs that employ most Americans.1

Similar patterns have been documented in every systematic study that has ever been conducted on this topic. In 2025, researchers found that fewer than 2 percent of U.S. state legislators had working-class jobs as their main or most recent occupations.2 A 2019 analysis in The New York Times found that only 12 of the 535 members of Congress serving at that time had ever held a working-class job.3 A 1979 study by the Insurance Information Institute, an advocacy group for the insurance industry, found that just 5 percent of U.S. state legislators had working-class jobs.4 A 1954 study by a political scientist at the University of North Carolina found that just 2 percent of members of Congress had been low-salary workers, wage earners, servants, or farm laborers.5 Throughout all of U.S. history, there has never been a session of Congress in which more than 2 or 3 percent of legislators had a working-class job when they first got into politics.6

Figure 1 compares the share of working-class jobs in the U.S. labor force to the most recent data we have on the rates at which people from working-class jobs become city council members, state legislators, members of Congress, governors, Supreme Court justices, and presidents. Viewed this way, it is clear that people from working-class jobs are rare in the halls of power in the United States. If working-class people were a political party, that party would make up about half of the electorate but just tiny percentages of our political institutions.

Figure 1: Working-Class Americans Rarely Hold Public Office in the United States

Warning!

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

Peter Hall at Scientific American:

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned this week and left behind a blunt accusation on X: his former employers—Anthropic and, before that, OpenAI—were “gambling with our lives.”

Then, in a move no public relations team would have signed off on, Evan Hubinger, an alignment science lead at Anthropic, wrote that he agreed with Coxon and that he put the chance of artificial intelligence killing all humans within the next decade at greater than 10 percent. All this came from a senior researcher at a company that has been racing to build the very systems he fears.

In an interview with Wired, Coxon said incidents such as July’s Hugging Face breach—in which OpenAI models that were undergoing a cybersecurity test circumvented controls that were meant to isolate them from the Internet and compromised parts of the AI start-up Hugging Face’s systems—helped spur him to speak out, though he stressed that the problem was broader. (Coxon, Hubinger, Anthropic and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Scientific American.)

Coxon’s and Hubinger’s fears, shared by plenty of other AI researchers, center on alignment, the difficult problem of matching an AI model’s behavior and apparent objectives to what humans want. The concerns still sound like science fiction: loss of control, recursive self-improvement and superintelligence—the possibility that AI models slip beyond their bounds, update their inner workings to gain power and eventually become too capable for humans to rein in.

Bruce Mehlman:

A Speech Against Assisted Suicide

Ethos in rhetoric is an appeal to the speaker's or writer's credibility, character, and authority to sway an audience.  Opposition to assisted suicide tends to be more prevalent on the political right than the political left.  So in a recent House of Commons debate, one speaker demonstrated the idea of ethos: a Labor MP who has a terminal illness spoke out against an assisted suicide bill.

The single speech that might well have defeated the wretched Assisted Dying Bill. pic.twitter.com/PuG1vJk9P7

— Emily Hewertson 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (@emilyhewertson) September 11, 2026

9/11 and Daily Life

Many posts have discussed the impact of 9/11.

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

Millennials and Gen Xers are more likely than other generations to report permanent changes to their lives, according to combined data from the 2021 and 2026 polls. Those generations of U.S. adults would have been between the ages of 5 and 36 when 9/11 occurred, ranging from children just beginning school to younger adults.

There are significant differences in responses to this question by race/ethnicity, with 51% of Hispanic adults, more than any other major subgroup, saying they have changed the way they live. That compares with 35% of Black adults and 22% of White adults.

Additionally, 40% of religious Americans, those who attend services every week, say they have altered their way of life, compared with 22% of those who seldom or never attend.

There are modest but not statistically meaningful differences by gender and party identification. People who live in urban, suburban and rural areas also do not differ, nor do Americans living in different regions of the country.

One possible reason for the result among Hispanics:support for restrictive immigration policy spiked after 9/11.

Republicans for a Social Security Tax Hike?

 Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Steve Thompson at WP:

For decades, Washington has replayed the same fight over taming the soaring national debt: Democrats cite a need for more taxes. Republicans refuse. And anyone who suggests cutting the biggest source of spending — federal retirement benefits — gets attacked.

But a coming crisis in Social Security appears to be pushing at least a few Republicans off the GOP’s long-standing pledge never to raise taxes.

This summer, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) in proposing to raise the payroll tax cap so people with higher incomes pay more into the program. Now the idea is emerging as an acceptable fix among other GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Tom Cole (Oklahoma), the influential chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

“We’ve got too many people who say, ‘Well, we have to stay within the current income level or stay at the current tax rate,’” Cole said in an interview. “I’m willing to look at the tax rate. I am willing to raise the amount of income through tax.”

The rare GOP concessions on taxes come as lawmakers begin to confront a Social Security shortfall so large and so imminent that the party’s traditional demand for curtailing benefits is unlikely to suffice. In just six years, millions of Social Security recipients will absorb a 22 percent cut in benefits unless lawmakers provide an immediate infusion of nearly $500 billion.

“Twenty or thirty years ago,” when the shortfall was far in the future, “you could come up with a straight-faced solution” that solved the problem entirely by cutting future benefits, said Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center who served from 2010 to 2015 as the Republican public trustee for Social Security.

Now the problem is so big and urgent, Blahous said, “I don’t think you can look at it with a straight face and not do all of the above.”

Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the longtime enforcer of Republican anti-tax orthodoxy, dismissed the crack in party discipline, arguing that Republicans should stick to demanding spending cuts. Otherwise, he said, they risk infuriating voters already angry about the high cost of living.

“When Republicans say no to tax increases, they win. When they say yes to tax increases, they lose,” Norquist said. “They don’t get spending cuts — at all. And, they get smeared in the next election.”

Mistrust of Government Information

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.

AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX and LINLEY SANDERS at AP:

Americans are more skeptical of government information than they were a few years ago, with majorities now saying they have little or no trust in federal government information about elections and politics, foreign affairs or the environment, a new poll finds.

The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USA Facts shows that while mistrust of government information has grown since 2024, it’s also higher than it was at the end of President Donald Trump’s first term, underscoring how his recent attempts to dismantle parts of the federal bureaucracy may have affected public confidence in the executive branch, particularly among Democrats.

Those suspicions extend to the results of the coming midterm elections. Only 34% of U.S. adults trust government certifications of election results “a great deal” or “quite a bit,” which is down slightly from 40% in 2024. Certification is a typically routine process in which local and state officials confirm the vote count, but it’s become politicized since Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

Trust in government information has also become more partisan since Trump’s first term, the survey found.

...

The findings come after a year and a half of upheaval in the executive branch. Trump began to dismantle key parts of the federal bureaucracy soon after entering the White House for the second time, moving to end longstanding programs and shutter entire agencies.

Since then, thousands of federal employees have been fired or left their jobs, substantially reducing the ranks of the government statisticians and leading experts to warn about risks to data quality

Immigration Attitudes After 9/11

Many posts have discussed immigration.

From Gallup:

The Data: Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, 58% of Americans favored decreasing immigration, up from 41% in June 2001.

Today’s View: Support for decreasing immigration spiked to 55% in 2024 after averaging 40% the prior two decades. In 2026, 29% of Americans would like to see decreased immigration, while 31% favor increasing it and 35% say it should be kept at its present level.

Calls for Less Immigration Surged After 9/11 The Data: Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, 58% of Americans favored decreasing immigration, up from 41% in June 2001. Today’s View: Support for decreasing immigration spiked to 55% in 2024 after averaging 40% the prior two decades. In 2026, 29% of Americans would like to see decreased immigration, while 31% favor increasing it and 35% say it should be kept at its present level.