The quote below is from an article in The Hill by Alberto Ramos, director of talent development at New Politics. He says he “was raised by a gritty, single mother of three in a trailer park on the eastern desert outskirts of Las Vegas. Every day, we scraped and struggled to get by, but thanks to her perseverance and determination, we survived.” Now he works to encourage people from similar backgrounds to run for political office:

Peter Levine, Associate Dean at Tufts University conducted a survey of over 700 candidates for local office in 2021 …. He asked about the degree to which concerns over credentials, fundraising networks, economic hardship, or public scrutiny might cause an otherwise viable candidate to hesitate to run. The starkest differences appeared when factoring in childhood economic adversity.

Almost half of the people who experienced poverty and received welfare when they were children — regardless of their race, gender, or level of education — doubted their credentials were good enough, compared to only 15 percent of those who never had. One-third of those who received welfare as children were anxious about even being able to afford a run for office, compared to a mere six percent of their peers who never had.

Some forms of disadvantage are being slowly and arduously addressed. The proportions of women, people of color, and sexual minorities among elected politicians are rising. The same is not true of social class. The proportion of working-class members of state legislatures declined from an already low rate between 1960 and 2010 (Carnes 2018). Our survey is meant to inform efforts to turn that trend around.

See also: Challenges Reported by Candidates for Local Office; class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesis; and social class inversion in the 2022 US elections.