The best political slogan I’ve ever heard of was hatched decades ago, in Texas, by Ralph Yarborough, a local judge who made his name as a country lawyer fighting big oil. During a 1958 campaign to defend his seat in the U.S. Senate, Yarborough hit the front steps of one county courthouse after another, preaching a populist message built on a simple pledge: “Let’s put the jam on the lower shelf where the little people can reach it.”

Think about this for a second. If society’s goodies are kept in a place that’s accessible to “the little people”—meaning those without much money or social advantages—the “big people,” those blessed with society’s riches and privileges, could still reach the jam, too. What I love about this metaphor is that Yarborough wasn’t asking for special favors for anyone. He just wanted life’s struggles to be fought on a level playing field.

Common sense, right? Squarely aligned with how most of us would define the principles of fairness and equality, and how we’ve long framed the American promise. Keeping that promise has always been a struggle, but these days a system of equal opportunity seems more elusive than ever.

As I laid out in the second and third installments of this monthly series, for the past four-plus decades—thanks to a steady stream of tax favors for corporations and the wealthy, paired with a series of financial insults to working Americans—we have essentially taken one jar of jam after another and put it on the top shelf. And despite all the signs that millions of Americans are screaming for solutions to today’s “affordability” problem, our representatives in Washington have, as a group, done almost nothing in response.

The reason has long been plain: Since 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed unlimited spending on elections, “Big Money” (typically corporate interests, but also wealthy donors) has increasingly dictated who wins and loses, and which legislation the victors advance, or ignore.

The good news is that, in recent months, I’ve been meeting a number of politicians—some already in office, but most running for their first national position—who seem determined to turn this trend around.

Before I tell you who I’m talking about, some full disclosure: I’ve met these candidates mostly through my volunteer work as a member of The Patriotic Millionaires, an organization that advocates for legislation to level the economic playing field, and for politicians who support that agenda. And, as I have come to know these candidates, I have sent many of them whatever financial support I can. I realize that writing about a politician that a reporter supports financially breaches journalistic norms, but I’m doing this for a reason. Although the stock market is up, most Americans are getting more and more squeezed. So when I meet up-and-comers who seem to have what it takes to confront our fundamental economic problems, I would feel negligent if I didn’t tell you about them, even if I am supporting them.

Take Brandon Riker, a first-time candidate to represent California’s 48th district, which stretches between Palm Springs and San Diego. Although Riker is an economist and has been a successful entrepreneur, he believes our financial system needs to be significantly restructured if it’s ever going to work for everyone. “This isn’t like Germany in 1945,” he told me. “It’s France in 1789!” Riker is referring to the year before the French Revolution, when the country’s feudal system had created such economic decay that the country’s debt payments consumed half of royal revenue. (Debt in the U.S. isn’t nearly that bad, but it, too, is on a runaway trajectory. This year, the national debt is already approaching $40 trillion, which is more than 120% of our entire Gross Domestic Product.)

Riker has built his campaign around what he calls “a second New Deal,” and many others aspiring to both House and Senate seats seem to be thinking along similar lines. What’s most striking is that an unprecedented number of them are working-class Americans.

I’m not referring to the types of candidates we’ve seen plenty of before—people who boast of humble origins but whose lives are now cushioned by fancy law degrees or lucrative corporate credentials; and whose campaigns are turbocharged by corporate donations as well (which typically neuters whatever they say on the stump). The candidates I’m talking about, who are mostly on the younger side, still work at regular jobs for a living—a reality that forces them to live a layer closer to the struggles that many Americans now face.

Interestingly, almost every one of these candidates has refused corporate PAC money. That commitment makes funding a race extremely challenging, especially given today’s hyper-inflated campaign costs, but it also comes with a moral pay-off: You can speak candidly, and fight for the people you come from. That’s what each one of these candidates vows to do.

Examples include teachers (like Lauren Jewett in Louisiana, and Randy Villegas in California); firefighters (like Sam Forstag, a young wildlands firefighter in Montana, and Bob Brooks, a firefighter and union leader in Pennsylvania); farmers (like Jamie Ager in western North Carolina); veterans (like Joanna Mendoza in Arizona and Dan Osborn, a mechanic in Nebraska); laborers (like Brian Poindexter, an ironworker in Ohio); dozens working in the healthcare industry (like Kimberly Hardy, a social worker and college professor in North Carolina); and labor organizers and activists in a variety of industries.1

The most high-profile candidates in this group have been Graham Platner, the oyster farmer running for the U.S. Senate in Maine; and James Talarico, the teacher and seminarian running to be a U.S. senator in Texas. On one level, these two candidates could not be more different—Talarico is clean-cut, calm, and kind, almost soothing; Platner is rough and feisty, perpetually stubbled, and a little impulsive. But they’re both being written and talked about as candidates that could open up new political frontiers, similar to how the media framed Zohran Momdani’s mayoral candidacy in NYC.2 Platner and Talarico also share the same general vision when it comes to their aims, and their enemies.

“The biggest divide in our country,” Talarico says in speech after speech, “is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom.” Platner’s version of the problem: “The system isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as is intended… That money went somewhere, and it didn’t go to you. Working-class people in this country feel like they’re not being represented.” We reverse this trend, Platner argues, by “sending up fighters from the working class who are willing to fight for the working class.”

This is great stuff to sell on the stump, but exactly what changes would politicians in this mold fight for once in office? There’s good news here, too: plans are just now starting to circulate, full of tangible initiatives and groundbreaking legislative proposals that could, finally, start to level America’s economic playing field. Some would give working families a tax break; others would alleviate the costs of housing, school, and health and child care. One aims for a complete package, including a long overdue raise of the minimum wage, reviving support for innovation and research, and new rules on our financial system so that corporate profits are shared by all.3

How do we pay for all these fixes? This question is, of course, eternal. One could even say that the challenge of finding money for new initiatives, of any ideology, is the political world’s beating but forever ailing heart. Yet a cure is readily at hand. The strange upside of the economy’s steady tilt toward the rich over the last 50 years is that it created a stockpile of $79 trillion that is just waiting to be tapped. This is the amount of wealth that has been moved—since 1975, solely through changes in the tax code—from the bottom 90 percent of American earners to the top 1 percent.

These funds aren’t, of course, sitting in the U.S. Treasury; they’re spread throughout myriad corporate profits, and in the top 1 percent’s bank accounts (many of which are now offshore, and safe from taxation). No one is going to return this money without a fight, even though it was gained through what was essentially wage theft, designed and facilitated by our own government.

The fairest way to return these funds is to reform the tax system. That begins with inching up tax rates, for both corporations and the wealthy, until they approach what they were when nationwide prosperity was its height, which was in the 1950s and 1960s. (That’s when rates were 53 percent for corporate taxes, and 87 percent for personal income–double what they are today.) But the real money isn’t in higher rates; it’s in clamping down on the numerous loopholes and financial manipulations that have been stuffed into the tax code in recent decades. These tricks have allowed the ultra-wealthy to escape paying taxes almost entirely, no matter what the rate is.

Getting tax revenue from the moneyed class is, of course, never easy. But as candidates try to ride voter outrage about today’s affordability crisis, maybe they can find a model, and some hope, in Ralph Yarborough’s story. Before aiming for national office, Yarborough ran for governor in Texas three times, and lost each time. After finally being elected to the U.S. Senate, in 1956, Yarborough kept on winning for years–propelled, at least in part, by his populist call for sharing the jam. Soon known in Texas as “the People’s Senator,” Yarborough helped pass some of the 20th century’s most important legislation on issues of equality.

Putting the jam on the lower shelf, it turns out, is pretty good politics.