Everyone wants to win working-class voters. But have they realized many are women?

Working class people, and especially women, like Mendoza, have rarely had a seat at the political table, though they make up nearly half of working-class voters, the group Republicans desperately want to cling onto and that Democrats hope to draw back.

It’s a group that is more diverse now than it’s ever been. 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 the group, which has long been disillusioned by political candidates who don’t actually understand them.

Definitions of what makes a working-class voter differ depending on who you ask. If it’s education — those who have less than a bachelor’s degree — then nearly half of the working class is women; 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 those working low-wage jobs, then 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’s gone now as those jobs have disappeared and service-sector jobs dominated by women have become the primary field for people without college degrees. Working-class people are now mostly service, retail and care workers, a group often forgotten in political and economic conversations in part because the work has been seen as gendered labor, though they have a front seat to most of the financial troubles that have plagued the country over the past several years. You don’t have to tell women, who do the majority of consumer purchases in this country, that groceries and gas are more expensive. They’ve lived it.