Democracy for the Working Class: ACORN's Engagement in Electoral Politics

In 1987, Jackie White ran for city council in Des Moines, Iowa. Her campaign materials touted her experience working to better her community. But White, a white, working-class single mother, did not earn her civic credentials in the Rotary Club or the PTA. Instead, White had served as chair of the North End Community Organization, a local chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Launched in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1970, ACORN organized working-class communities in cities across the United States to fight for public policies that would benefit low-income people and neighborhoods. White’s campaign literature highlighted the working-class characteristics she thought qualified her to be a city councilor. She insisted that her resume was “just the kind...we need for people in public office.”

White was one of dozens of ACORN members who ran for public office in the 1970s and 1980s, and her candidacy does not fit easily into prevailing narratives in post-1960s American political history. In explaining declining voter turnout among low-income voters, historians have emphasized a declining faith in government and the Democratic Party’s focus on suburban voters and pursuit of neoliberal policies. These explanations do not tell the whole story. This paper explores ACORN members’ engagement in electoral politics, from endorsing candidates to voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns to running for office. ACORN’s campaigns challenge notions of a disaffected and the politically disengaged working class. ACORN members developed collective political priorities, mobilized around issues that mattered to their communities, and saw electoral politics as a key mechanism for implementing their vision of fairness, rooted in a robust public sector and the use of government redistributive and regulatory powers. ACORN members’ extensive engagement in electoral politics, then, highlights the substantial barriers working-class people faced in making their voices count in American democratic systems.