Congressional candidate JoAnna Mendoza can rattle off grocery prices from her hometown of Eloy, Arizona, without hesitation. A couple of months ago, a pound of ground beef cost about $13, a tomato was $1.50, and "a freaking cucumber was like $3."

Mendoza knows these numbers because she is a single mother of a 10-year-old who has faced the same struggles as most working women: finding steady employment, a good pediatrician and childcare that doesn't break the bank. Her parents were farmworkers, and she spent 20 years in the military because there were few economic opportunities for her back home. She is now running for a U.S. House seat representing Arizona's 6th congressional district.

This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th.

Working-class people — especially women like Mendoza — have rarely had a seat at the political table, even though they make up nearly half of working-class voters, a group Republicans desperately want to hold onto and Democrats hope to win back. The group is now more diverse than ever. 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 a group long disillusioned by candidates who don't actually understand them. With control of Congress at stake in the midterms, both parties have an added incentive to figure out how.

Who counts as working class?

Definitions vary depending on who you ask. If the measure is education — those without a bachelor's degree — then nearly half of the working class is women, and 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 defined as those in low-wage jobs, 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 image is gone as those jobs have disappeared and service-sector jobs dominated by women have become the primary field for people without college degrees. U.S. manufacturing employment has declined dramatically from its mid-20th-century peak, while care, retail and service work has grown to employ a far larger share of workers without college degrees.

Working-class people today are mostly service, retail and care workers, a group often forgotten in political and economic conversations partly because the work has been seen as gendered labor — even though they have a front seat to most of the financial troubles that have plagued the country in recent years. Women, who make the majority of consumer purchases in the United States, don't need to be told that groceries and gas are more expensive. They've lived it.

Democrats' lost advantage

A fundamental misunderstanding of working-class voters — and of the messages that resonate with them — caused Democrats to fumble their advantage with the group. Twenty years ago, Democrats held 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 families. Working-class voters respect people who talk to them directly — Trump's "straight talk" — and those who have succeeded 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 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.

A midterm opening

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 fielded women working-class candidates whose personal backgrounds and messages could connect with voters. It amounts to a litmus test for the Democratic Party: Can working-class women candidates help win back working-class votes?

For her part, Mendoza is 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. Sometimes you gotta throw an f-bomb."

She approaches conversations with voters the way she talks to the moms of children on her son's little league baseball team. They're worried about the cost of child care, so expensive that it doesn't even make sense to return to the workforce despite the extra income. Child care costs have risen faster than overall inflation in recent years and, in many states, now rival the price of college tuition or rent. 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.

Williams argued in her book "Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back" that Democrats focused too much on college-educated liberals and forgot working-class people. The message became about policies that would help people advance in their jobs, rather than policies supporting 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. In 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.

Candidates with lived experience

If Democrats pay attention, future cycles may feature 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 losing her primary in August, she ran 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 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, president of Emily's List.

The past couple of years have been particularly challenging for working-class women. They returned to work in high numbers after the pandemic, benefiting from a climate in which businesses offered better benefits, more flexibility and higher pay, allowing 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, 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 lies in the gender pay gap: after years of shrinking, the gap 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 are looking for candidates who understand that, voters told The 19th.

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 Cook thinks of candidates who have stuck out, she thinks of people like Omar Fateh, who ran for mayor of 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 Cook, it's not just about someone who understands that rents are high or groceries are expensive, but 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 avoid bringing it home after work, she would toss all her clothes immediately into the dryer so the heat could kill any eggs that may have hitchhiked on her. But her dryer was old, the belt broke, and she couldn't afford a new one. So, in the middle of a Minnesota winter, she started taking her clothes off in the entryway and throwing them on the front step. On weekends, she carried 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 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. Healthcare costs for her family of four tripled in the past two years. She is paying $2,100 a month for health insurance with an $8,000 deductible — a deductible 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 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."