Working class people, and especially women, like Mendoza, have rarely had a seat at the political table, though they make up nearly half of working-class voters, the group Republicans desperately want to cling onto and that Democrats hope to draw back.
It’s a group that is more diverse now than it’s ever been. Gone are the days when the only image of a working-class voter was a blue-collar White man who works in a factory and drives a truck, though that is still who politicians often pander to.
Political messaging that speaks to the everyday needs of the diversifying working class could recapture the interest of the group, which has long been disillusioned by political candidates who don’t actually understand them.
Definitions of what makes a working-class voter differ depending on who you ask. If it’s education — those who have less than a bachelor’s degree — then nearly half of the working class is women; in parts of the country, most of them are also people of color, said Valerie Wilson, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute who has studied working-class people. If working-class voters are those working low-wage jobs, then they are already majority women, who occupy two-thirds of the 40 lowest-paid occupations.
“The sort of traditional view of ‘working class’ was a White man in a hard hat, a construction worker, maybe someone who was in manufacturing,” Wilson said. That’s gone now as those jobs have disappeared and service-sector jobs dominated by women have become the primary field for people without college degrees. Working-class people are now mostly service, retail and care workers, a group often forgotten in political and economic conversations in part because the work has been seen as gendered labor, though they have a front seat to most of the financial troubles that have plagued the country over the past several years. You don’t have to tell women, who do the majority of consumer purchases in this country, that groceries and gas are more expensive. They’ve lived it.
A fundamental misunderstanding of working-class voters — and the messages that resonate with them — caused Democrats to fumble their advantage with this group in recent years. Twenty years ago, Democrats enjoyed a 14-point advantage with voters who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. By 2024, Republicans had a 6-point advantage instead. In the 2024 presidential election, working-class voters favored President Donald Trump by 14 points.
Republicans have effectively understood that their voters want good, secure jobs that allow them to live independently and support their family. Working-class voters respect people who talk to them directly — Trump’s “straight talk” — and those who have been successful through their own hard work, social inequality expert Joan C. Williams argued in 2016.
“What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that,” Williams wrote after Trump was elected in 2016. “I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.”
A decade later, Trump indeed has not delivered on many of his economic promises. His second term has been dominated by war in Iran and aggressive tariff policies that have driven up prices rather than balanced trade, as he promised. That has eroded Trump’s advantage with his strongest working class supporters, White people, who now disapprove of his handling of the economy.
Democrats see an opening this midterm cycle. A recent poll found that adults who self-describe as working class expect progressive Democrats to best represent their interests, followed by moderate Republicans. Working-class women already tend to skew more progressive than men: Every racial subgroup of working-class women, except White women, favored Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024.
This year, Democrats, more than Republicans, have put up women working-class candidates who have both a personal background and message that could connect with voters. It’s something of a litmus test for the Democratic Party: Can working-class women candidates help them win back working-class votes?
For her part, Mendoza said she’s not a fan of the Democrats’ messaging.
“Can Democrats just be normal and not have to use $50 words to talk to people?” Mendoza said. “Spending 20 years in the military, retiring from the Marine Corps, I personally drop about 20 to 30 f-bombs a day,” she said. “Sometimes you gotta throw an f-bomb.”
She approaches conversations with voters the way she talks to the moms of the children on her son’s little league baseball team. They’re worried about the cost of child care, which is so expensive that it doesn’t even make sense to get back into the workforce even though they could use the extra income. They’re worried about school supplies and utility bills, just like Mendoza, who spent more than $100 on her son’s supplies this summer and $391 on her most recent electric bill.
“The majority of women are what I like to call the chief financial officers of their families, and they’re sitting here trying to figure out how they’re going to make ends meet,” Mendoza said.
Congressional candidate JoAnna Mendoza has leaned into her working class background as she runs for a seat in the U.S. House to represent Arizona’s 6th congressional district. (Courtesy JoAnna Mendoza campaign)Williams argued in her book “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back” that Democrats have focused too much on college-educated liberals and forgotten about working-class people. The messages became about policies that would help people advance in their jobs instead of policies that supported people who worked hard and just wanted to earn a living.
For working-class voters, including women, class can trump gender as the determining factor behind a vote. Look at the 2016 presidential race: White working-class women voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 27-point margin.
“Working-class women are working-class people, something upper-middle-class women often forget,” Williams said. Their preferred candidate: another working-class person.
If Democrats pay attention, future cycles may have more candidates like Kaela Berg, a flight attendant and single mom who ran for a highly contested seat representing Minnesota’s 2nd congressional district in the U.S. House. Before she lost her primary in August, she was running her campaign between flights, talking about living paycheck to paycheck, going without health insurance during the pandemic and at one point living in a friend’s basement. She never graduated college and has long been active in her union.
“I don’t have to look at a white paper on affordability. I know people are struggling and that this economy is hurting people,” Berg told The 19th.
Polling by Emily’s List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, has found that women are more likely than men to be struggling financially, more likely to say they are looking for candidates who will fight for them and also more likely to blame Washington for their financial struggles.
“It was very clear based on that research that driving wins in this environment, in this economy, was really going to hinge on putting leaders in front of voters who truly get it, truly understand their struggles. And the reason for that is because the depth and breadth of people’s financial struggle is really stark,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List.
The past couple of years have been particularly challenging for working-class women in the economy. They returned to work in high numbers after the pandemic, benefiting from a climate in which businesses were offering better benefits, more flexibility and higher pay, which allowed them to move into good jobs. But those improvements were short-lived.
“We’re seeing a pretty stunning reversal of that that is impacting the real working-class jobs that are sort of manual labor, low-wage, low-education requirement jobs predominantly held by women,” said Kate Bahn, the chief economist and senior vice president of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank focused on gender and economic equity.
The evidence is in the gender pay gap: After years of shrinking, the gap actually widened over the past two years for the first time since the 1960s.
Working class women are facing a labor market far more unstable than in the last election cycle, and they’re looking for candidates who understand that, voters told The 19th.
Politicians who come from working class backgrounds, like Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (center) and Minnesota state Sen. Omar Fateh (right), are resonating with voters during a particularly challenging economic period. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)Jenny Cook, a paraprofessional who works with special needs children in Oakdale, Minnesota, has been knocking on doors with her union this summer in support of candidates like Peggy Flanagan, who is running to represent Minnesota in the Senate and often talks about growing up in Section 8 housing with a single mother who relied on food stamps.
When she thinks of the candidates who have stuck out, Cook thinks of people like Omar Fateh, who ran for mayor in Minneapolis last year. The fact that he was a renter stayed with her. “That feels like someone who has a lived experience that mirrors mine and many others in a way that I don’t know that every politician can really wrap their heads around what that’s like,” she said.
For her, it’s not just about someone who understands that rents are high or that groceries are expensive, but about a candidate who understands how destabilizing all those things can be.
Cook often lives paycheck to paycheck and sells plasma or items on Facebook Marketplace to keep up with bills. She offers her own example: Last winter, one of her students had a bed bug situation at home. To try to avoid bringing it home with her after work, she’d toss all her clothes immediately into the dryer so the heat could kill any eggs that may have hitchhiked on her. But, because her dryer was old, the belt broke and she couldn’t afford a new one. So, in the middle of Minnesota winter, she started taking her clothes off in the entryway and throwing them on the front step. On weekends, she’d carry them to the laundromat.
“The amount of sleep I lost, and I just like, I feel like I’m still trying to recover from the financial impact of just that,” Cook said. “I always feel like one crisis away from everything falling apart.”
When she’s out doorknocking, she hears disillusionment. She hears exhaustion. So many people are so stuck in the struggle of day-to-day survival that they can barely plug into politics at all. Few candidates break through the noise.
“It almost feels like, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if I could pay attention to who my candidates are and care on that deep of a level?’” Cook said.
Roxy Hoda, a hospitality worker at Target Field in Minnesota, says affordability is her No. 1 issue. The healthcare costs for her family of four tripled in the past two years. She’s paying $2,100 a month for health insurance with an $8,000 deductible that she already blew through at the start of the year when her 4-year-old son was hospitalized with asthma.
She is also supporting Flanagan, whom she called “a breath of fresh air.”
“As a woman of color that has come from that similar background as me, I know that she understands what it is to be a woman of color in this society,” Hoda said.
It’s the one bright spot that has helped assuage some of her disillusionment with a Democratic Party that she feels has “been too scared to really get emotional.”
For Hoda, it comes down to this: “We just need to know that you understand and you relate, and you’re with us and you’re fighting.”
Everyone Wants To Win Working-Class Voters. But Have They Realized Many Are Women? was originally published by The 19th and is republished with permission.
Though these workers provide vital help to families and homeowners across the country, they have been excluded from fundamental labor rights for decades.
Silvia González, a community organizer at Casa Latina, helped lead the statewide fight for these protections. Casa Latina works for the well-being of Latino immigrants in Seattle, offering education, community organizing opportunities and connecting domestic workers with temporary jobs through their Day Worker Center.
State Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, center, stands with members of the Washington State Domestic Workers Coalition at the state Capitol on Feb. 28, 2026. The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights passed in the House that day, before being signed into law in March. (Photo courtesy of Casa Latina)
González came to Casa Latina in 2011 to find work as a house cleaner. When she learned that domestic workers like herself did not have fundamental rights to fair pay and often had to endure unsafe workplaces to make a living, she wanted a domestic workers bill of rights, González said.
In 2013, she joined Casa Latina’s staff, supporting their Mujeres Sin Fronteras program. This leadership program provides a space where women domestic workers can organize to advocate for better working conditions.
“This changed my life completely,” González said. “Working closely with Mujeres Sin Fronteras — every woman has different stories. Every woman is different, and these give to me more power for fighting for the labor rights. And it’s not easy, because most of these women are women of color, immigrant women, and they have a lot of challenges.”
In the United States, the domestic workforce is largely made up of Latino, Black and Asian American women. These workers are also twice as likely to be immigrants than other workers. González said it has been hard to rally domestic workers to speak to legislators in the state Capitol because they are afraid of current threats of immigration enforcement.
González’s time at Casa Latina and her own career as a domestic worker is not the only part of her life that has informed her activism. She has memories of her own mother working as a lavandera, doing laundry as a domestic worker in Mexico.
González described watching her mother spend hours washing clothes by hand on the banks of a river. “[Domestic workers] don’t receive enough money,” she said, her eyes tearing up under green sparkly eyeliner.
When González started her career as a domestic worker in the United States, these memories gave her the power to fight for fair pay for domestic workers, she said.
González went on to organize for Seattle’s bill of rights while working as a house cleaner. She is now one of 13 members on Seattle’s Domestic Workers Standards Board, which helps introduce further protections for domestic workers at the city level.
Though domestic workers in Seattle have had labor protections since 2018, those working in other areas of the state have been fighting for these fundamental rights for years.
González is also on the National Domestic Workers Alliance Board of Directors, who are trying to pass nationwide protections for domestic workers. Even as her work has risen to city, state and federal levels, González said she thinks of every win as a collective effort.
“It’s not only me. It’s Casa Latina also,” she said. “All my compañeras, all domestic workers — all the voices come with me.”
Lisbeth H., who asked to omit her last name, is another domestic worker who has been advocating for this legislation. She has helped raise over 28 children in her career as a childcare provider, commuting from Lynnwood to Seattle for nanny jobs.
“What it means for me, is that I don’t have to go and just ask for things to my future employers. I would go and say, there’s a bill that is protecting me,” Lisbeth H. said. “I think that kind of backs me up, supports me and gives me the strength to advocate more for myself.”
Lisbeth H. said the fair working conditions she has experienced were due to her employers’ ethics and her own negotiation skills, but she knew other workers did not know how to advocate for the same protections in their workplaces.
It was an empowering moment, Lisbeth H. said, to speak out in support of these protections. She has been rallying for a statewide bill of rights since 2024. This year, she worked behind the scenes to help pass the law with the Nanny Collective — an organization focused on educating childcare providers across Washington state about their rights in the workplace.
Casa Latina and the Nanny Collective are both part of the Washington Domestic Workers Coalition, a group of more than eight community organizations that came together in 2024 to pass the statewide bill.
Now, domestic workers across Washington will have rights to minimum wage, overtime pay, written agreements in a language they understand, advance termination notices, safer working environments, protection from retaliation and the right to file a complaint if a violation occurs.
State Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, has been advocating for these protections for domestic workers since Seattle’s version of the bill passed in 2018. Saldaña was standing next to Ferguson in the Capitol when he signed the bill into law this March.
“It was so energetic. We had children, we had organizers, we had workers that had been working on this for basically a decade,” Saldaña said.
“This workforce in particular is so vulnerable, so under valued, so historically invisible,” Saldaña continued. “To be able to have them take center stage, to be able to have had the amazing bill signing that they’re able to do in the Capitol, and be able then to really see a difference in their workplaces, is priceless.”
The bill, which goes into effect July 1, 2027, helps create clear rules for both domestic workers and employers. Until the bill is in place, González said, she will be raising money to fund the implementation of the law. After that, she will continue advocating for more protections for domestic workers, beyond these basic rights.
This hard fought win owes itself to the ongoing persistence of Washington’s domestic workers and organizers like González and Lisbeth H.
“It was amazing, because since 2024 we tried, we pushed, and things didn’t work as we expected,” Lisbeth H. said. “When this happened, it was like telling everybody, ‘Hey, we won, we got what we need, because this is our work, we deserve dignity, and this will protect us more. It will not depend just on each of us to negotiate. We have a bill that now protects us.’”
Washington’s Domestic Workers Win Protections After Years of Organizing was first published by Washington Latino News and is republished with permission.
Ruby Storey is a freelance journalist, multimedia storyteller and incoming general assignment reporter at My Neighborhood News. In the University of Washington’s journalism and public interest communication program, she has found a passion for local reporting and uplifting the voices of communities who have been underrepresented in mainstream media.
