American politics feels hopelessly broken. Extreme political polarization, enormous amounts of Pac money sloshing around during elections, and the increasing power of the rich make it seem like nothing, and no one, can set the country on the right track. But a new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics looks at a surprisingly simple way that ordinary people might have more influence in our political system: run more union members for office.

The forthcoming CWCP report, co-authored by Jared Abbott, Benjamin Y Fong, Fred DeVeaux, Dustin Guastella and Sam Zacher, and sponsored by Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, looked at the broad political impact of political candidates with a labor union background. We found that candidates who come out of the union movement are exactly what many people in the country desperately crave: politicians who sound like them, who advocate for working people, and who provide solutions that actually work to fix our broken system.

Unions have been involved in politics for a long time, but their influence is diminishing. Not because they are spending less but just because of the explosion of individual donor and independent expenditure spending over the past 20 years. In this environment, many unions have taken a highly defensive posture toward elections, almost exclusively limiting their support to incumbent politicians they view as less bad than the alternative. But this is misguided. Unions – which have long relied on the assumption that organized people can trump organized money – are overlooking their greatest political asset: their people.

We found that union candidates invoked pro-worker themes 159% more than their........

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