The Labor Party was founded because both major parties stopped representing ordinary Americans a long time ago, and no one was doing anything serious about it. The evidence for that is empirical. A 2024 study from the Center for Working-Class Politics surveyed 3,000 voters and found that economic populist messaging, the kind that names specific corporate villains and makes specific promises about wages and costs, outperformed standard Democratic and Republican economic messaging by double digits. Voters want someone to fight for them. They just don't believe either party will.

They're right not to believe it.

The Money Explains Everything

In 2024, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than $370 million lobbying Congress. The real estate industry spent over $100 million. Wall Street spent hundreds of millions more. That money went to Democrats and Republicans. Both parties cashed the checks.

And then drug prices stayed high. Rent kept climbing. Wages stayed flat for most people while corporate profits hit record levels.

This is not a coincidence. When pharmaceutical companies fund your campaign, you don't pass laws that cut into their margins. When real estate developers fund your campaign, you don't pass laws that cut into their rents. When Wall Street funds your campaign, you don't pass laws that cost them money. The donor relationship is not incidental to policy outcomes. It is the mechanism driving them.

The Labor Party was founded on the premise that this can only be fixed from outside the system. You cannot reform a party that depends on corporate money by electing better people to it. The money remains, and the money wins. The only way to actually fight pharmaceutical companies, real estate developers, and Wall Street is to build a party they haven't bought.

What Both Parties Got Wrong

Democrats will tell you they're the party of workers. Republicans will tell you they're the party of regular people. Both have been in power repeatedly over the last forty years. Here's what happened during that time: wages for most Americans grew far slower than productivity, meaning workers created more value and kept less of it. The cost of housing, healthcare, and education outpaced income growth by wide margins. Union membership collapsed from roughly 35 percent of the workforce in the 1950s to under 11 percent today. And both parties presided over all of it.

The problem is not that the wrong people were elected. The problem is that both parties answer to the same donor class, and the donor class has done very well.

Why Not Reform One of the Existing Parties?

It's a fair question. The answer is that reforming a party from within requires winning a majority of that party's leadership, and that leadership is selected partly through a fundraising process that rewards candidates who are friendly to corporate donors. You end up fighting the institution with one hand while the institution's funding structure works against you with the other.

There are genuinely good people in both parties. The problem is structural, sitting at the level of incentives that shape what politicians can say, what they can propose, and who they owe favors to when they win. Those incentives don't change because one good candidate gets through. They reassert themselves in every subsequent election, every committee appointment, every piece of legislation that needs a vote.

Building something new is harder in the short term, and it's the only approach that works in the long term.

The Timing

Independent voters now outnumber both registered Democrats and registered Republicans. Voter turnout among non-college Americans, the group with the most to gain from economic populist policy, has historically been suppressed by a sense that neither party is actually for them. Candidates like Dan Osborn in Nebraska ran as independents in 2024 and came within a few points of winning a Senate seat in a deep red state by talking directly about wages, corporate greed, and the failure of both parties. The opening is real.

The Labor Party was founded to fill it. Not as a protest vote or a symbolic exercise, but as a long-term project to build the infrastructure, develop the candidates, achieve ballot access in all 50 states, and win elections at every level of government. That takes time. We're spending that time building it right.

What "Founded in 2024" Actually Means

The party launched in 2024 and adopted its national charter in January 2025. At this point it has members in 46 to 48 states, a detailed governance structure, and an active plan to pursue ballot access state by state through 2032.

What it doesn't have yet is a long track record. We know that. We're also clear-eyed about why that's not a reason to wait. The two parties that do have long track records have spent those decades demonstrating exactly why a new option is necessary. The time to build the alternative is now.

If you're frustrated with where things are and skeptical that either party will actually fix it, that frustration is well-founded. The Labor Party exists because a lot of people share it, and because frustration without somewhere to put it doesn't change anything.