America's renters are emerging as a political -2-

Rhett Tock came across the Connecticut Tenants Union after moving into a roach-infested apartment.

The Connecticut Tenants Union plans to continue the push for just-cause eviction in the 2027 legislative cycle, said Luke Melonakos, the union's vice president. They're encouraged by support for the initiative from prominent state-level politicians, including the governor, Democrat Ned Lamont. Though the union's activism is on the state level, Melonakos said it'll be watching the midterm elections closely. How candidates across the country who have made renter priorities a part of their campaigns fare could influence how Connecticut's Democrat-controlled legislature approaches the issue.

For Tock, whose rent consumes almost an entire biweekly paycheck, "the idea of homeownership is anywhere from 'so far out' to 'I have given up,' " which fuels his activism as a long-term renter.

Political groups are harnessing this angst. In early 2025, Run for Something, an organization that recruits and trains progressive millennial and Gen Z candidates for state and local office, launched an initiative that aims to get more renters elected.

Historically, candidates have focused on policies like down-payment assistance that can make buying a house more affordable, but today, more 20- and 30-somethings are staring down years or even decades of renting. "If you're only talking about making it easier to buy a home, young people are going to tune you out," Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, told MarketWatch. "When you get renters into office, it changes the tenor of the debate."

Litman and other Run for Something staffers began noticing that candidates in the pipeline were identifying themselves as renters around 2023. In some cases, people interested in running weren't sure if renting would be detrimental to their candidacies. After the activity surrounding the 2024 presidential election died down, Run for Something decided it made sense to build off of momentum from areas like Minneapolis; Cambridge, Mass.; and Austin, Texas, where elected renters had some success shifting zoning and other policy to be more renter-friendly.

Now recruiting renter candidates is a major part of Run for Something's strategy around the midterms, particularly given that housing affordability is top of mind for many Americans. So far in the 2026 cycle the organization has endorsed 178 renters - 37% of all of its endorsements.

One of the candidates endorsed was Aparna Raj, a tenant organizer who recently won the Democratic primary for a city council seat in Washington, D.C., representing a ward of the city that is about two-thirds renter and Democratic.

Raj, 32, hopes to restore some longstanding tenant protections that the city council recently weakened.

As a longtime renter herself, Raj has experience with being a neglected tenant. In her 20s she lived in a group house where the landlord refused to fix anything. A company later acquired the home but also didn't make repairs, pushing Raj and her roommates out. The house was later turned into a condominium.

When campaigning as a renter, Raj said she received positive reactions from voters who rented. Many appreciated that she could relate to the challenges they faced. Some homeowners, meanwhile, believed that renters are transient by nature and shouldn't take part in local government.

But "in this economic environment, when people are renters for longer and maybe renters for their whole lives, that identity is really resonating with people more, especially my generation," she said. Part of the reason Raj said she decided to run was that she wanted to add a renter voice to a city council where homeowners are the majority.

As a member of the city council, Raj hopes to increase housing supply, particularly the supply of units that are big enough for families, and expand tenant protections like rent stabilization.

Even beyond policy prescriptions, having renter candidates embrace their tenant identity has been useful for connecting with young voters, Litman said. When candidates rent, it may telegraph to a voter where they are on the class spectrum, what generation they're in and the kinds of affordability challenges they're dealing with, she said.

"It's a way to signal, 'I'm one of you, I get it, I live life the way that you do,' " she added. "I feel that sense of instability. I feel that sense of lack of access to the American Dream."

The rise of tenant voting blocs

As renter candidates become more successful, tenant unions, which have often focused on pushing landlords for changes within their own buildings, expect to have more receptive partners in local, state and federal offices.

"We think a lot about what cities, states and the federal government could or should do and about tenants as a political and economic class broadly," said Tara Raghuveer, the director of the Tenant United Federation. Her organization launched in 2024 as a federation of local tenant unions across the country.

Right now, they're in the midst of thinking about crafting a legislative agenda, knowing affordability, including housing costs, will be a core issue in the midterm elections, she said. At the local level, some of the unions affiliated with TUF are running their own candidates, Raghuveer added.

'If you're only talking about making it easier to buy a home, young people are going to tune you out.'Amanda Litman, Run for Something

Johnathan Duncan, won a city council race in Kansas City, Mo., in 2023 thanks in part to his work with Kansas City Tenants, the city's tenants union. "Missouri has some of the worst protection for renters anywhere in the country," Duncan told MarketWatch, and it impacts anyone whose earnings are not keeping up with the cost of living.

Tenants "are veterans. They are seniors. They are young folks. They are leftists. They are conservatives. Some of them are Trump supporters," Duncan said. Rent affordability "is a unifying issue, a galvanizing issue. And it cuts through all the noise of your political party."

While Duncan is a homeowner, he said he was only able to afford it with a 0%-down VA home loan as an Iraq war veteran. "You shouldn't have to fight in a war in order to be housing-secure," he said.

As this nascent political movement takes off, there's evidence that pro-renter policies are already resonating with voters.

Russell Weaver, the director of research at Cornell University's Buffalo Co-Lab, wanted to get a better sense of what was motivating renter turnout after an upstart candidate rode a wave of renter support to beat the incumbent mayor in the Democratic primary in the Buffalo mayor's race in 2021 (although she lost in the general election, when renters were a smaller share of the turnout pool).

Weaver and his team looked at other recent races in New York state. Not only was renter turnout about five to seven percentage points higher in races where candidates were backing tenant protections like just-cause eviction, the pro-tenant candidates also won those races.

"Actually going out there and putting tenant issues and tenant concerns on the ballot can motivate tenants to go out and vote, even though historically they voted at much lower rates" than homeowners, he told MarketWatch.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group, is working to increase renter representation by working with housing provider councils, voting-rights groups and other organizations to inform tenants about the renter-related issues at stake through its nonpartisan Our Homes, Our Votes campaign. They also provide information on how renters can overcome obstacles to getting to the voting booth, including securing child care and transportation.

"They may not even know what might be on the ballot that might be important to them," said Chantelle Wilkinson, the coalition's vice president of strategic partnerships and campaigns. "When our voices get heard we can shape what our communities look like."

In Maryland, Grant Samms has found that the people who live in his community don't want people to be pushed out of town by rent-gouging landlords.

"They don't want their kids to have to go to a new school two, three, four consecutive years in a row, because they get priced out and keep moving," Samms said. "Everyone sees the damage that that does."

-Jillian Berman -Venessa Wong

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