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Can These 4 Working-Class Populists Win In November?

We’re keeping an eye on their races to find out. Here’s where things stand.

Rebecca Cooke, Bob Brooks, Dan Osborn, and Brian Poindexter.

For years, those of us who have argued that Democrats should be running more working-class, unapologetically economically populist candidates have had to make our case largely in theory. Since there were vanishingly few real-world Democrats who fit the bill—particularly in competitive districts—we would show survey-takers a hypothetical ironworker who railed against corporate elites and corrupt politicians, and test whether they liked him better than a hypothetical lawyer whose main issue was Donald Trump’s threats to democracy.

But 2026 is different. There are a host of flesh-and-blood working-class progressive populists on the ballot in swing districts across the country this year—from Senate hopefuls like Maine’s Troy Jackson and Nebraska’s Dan Osborn to Ohio gubernatorial candidates Aaron Ford and Amy Acton, to the “Blue-Collar Brigade” of House candidates running in California and Pennsylvania and many places in between.

We at the Center for Working-Class Politics wanted to know what happens to candidates like these over the course of a campaign, and whether their working-class economic populism turns out to be an asset or a liability. So we chose four candidates running in broadly comparable places—three Republican-held House seats and one Senate seat with a Republican incumbent—and, together with the polling firm Nira Data and The Nation, we launched the Economic Populist Tracker to follow their campaigns from now through Election Day.

Each month through November, Nira Data is surveying 1,200 to 1,500 voters in each of the four states and districts. These are places with little consistent public polling, so the surveys can tell us something otherwise hard to know: whether these candidates’ working-class, economic populist appeals are helping them run ahead of what their districts’ normal partisan leanings would predict, and what obstacles they are hitting as the election draws closer. We are also tracking the candidates’ ads, speeches, and press coverage to see how they present themselves and how their opponents respond. Results will run in The Nation each month, with a final assessment after the election.

We have no role in any of these campaigns; we are not advising them or polling for them. Our aim is to find out whether progressive economic populism can deliver in the races that matter most, and what separates the candidates who make it work from those who don’t.

The August results of our tracker give economic populists real grounds for optimism. But they also came with some clear warning signs. All four candidates are within reach of winning, and each has a bloc of undecided voters tailor-made for their message. And in three of the four races, voters are far more likely to see the Democrat as a working-class candidate than the Republican. That matters, because our research on every congressional candidate since 2010 finds that working-class candidates draw more support from working-class voters than other candidates do—exactly the voters economic populists in swing districts need to win over most.

But at the same time, these candidates are not effectively reaching some of the voters they’re running to reach. Only one of the four candidates is running ahead of the Democratic Party among working-class voters. In three of the four races, only a minority of the voters who hold an opinion of the candidate know he or she came from a working-class background. And, apart from the need for greater exposure, these candidates’ biggest problem is their association with the Democratic Party, rather than anything about the candidates themselves.

Our four candidates are:

§ Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic and former strike leader running as an independent against Nebraska Senate Republican and banking heir Pete Ricketts; 

§ Union ironworker Brian Poindexter, running in Ohio’s Seventh Congressional District;

§ Firefighter and union president Bob Brooks, running in Pennsylvania’s Seventh Congressional District; and

§ Rebecca Cooke, a dairy farmer’s daughter and waitress running is Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District.

Each district was carried by Donald Trump in 2024, and all have a greater percentage of working-class residents than the national average. All of our candidates have done manual or service work, do not have a four-year college degree, are running a clearly economic populist campaign focused sharply on kitchen table economic issues, and are facing a wealthy Republican opponent.

Where the races stand

Based on the August wave of our Economic Populism poll tracker, among likely voters:

§ Cooke leads Derrick Van Orden by just over six points, 44.8–38.4;

§ Poindexter leads Max Miller by nearly six points, 35.5–29.7;

§ Brooks leads Ryan Mackenzie by just over one point, 36.4-35.2; and

§ Osborn trails........

© The Nation