Poor People's Campaign to Lawmakers: If You Want Our Votes, Work to End 'Death by Poverty'

Leaders of the Poor People's Campaign delivered its policy agenda to lawmakers at statehouses across the United States on Monday and warned that if elected representatives don't act, they won't get the votes of low-wage workers who were integral to the defeat of former President Donald Trump four years ago.

Monday's actions, which included visits with state lawmakers from both major parties, were part of a broader 42-week mobilization of poor voters that the Poor People's Campaign announced last month.

"Do not listen to those who say poor and low-wage voters are apathetic about politics or marginal to election outcomes," Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, national co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, said during a rally in North Carolina over the weekend.

"Poor and low-wage voters have the power to change electoral outcomes up and down the ballot in November," said Barber, pointing to the slim 2020 margins in key battleground states such as Michigan and Arizona. "We are putting politicians in every state on notice: If you want our votes, you must legislate to end the crisis of death by poverty in America."

The agenda that organizers presented to state lawmakers on Monday calls for immediate action to abolish "poverty as the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S.," end "voter suppression in all its forms," raise minimum wages to a living wage, guarantee healthcare and affordable housing for all, bolster worker protections, and more.

"We are seeing from state houses all over the nation that we will not be silenced or ignored anymore," Von Allen Goodman, tri-chair of the Massachusetts Poor People's Campaign, said during a rally in Boston on Saturday.

"When our politics makes it easier to get a gun than to get food, quality education, living wages, or healthcare, then there's a problem with the soul of our nation."

The Poor People's Campaign estimates that there are around 85 million poor and low-wage eligible voters across the U.S.—roughly 30% of the country's electorate. In 2020, according to a study released by the campaign and its allies, 168 million Americans who voted had an annual household income of less than $50,000.

Research published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that a decade or more of uninterrupted poverty is linked to 295,000 deaths per year in the U.S.—roughly 800 deaths per day. That made long-term poverty the country's fourth-leading cause of death in 2019, behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking.

"In our campaign across the country, poor and low-wage allies have decided that we are not accepting the silence from the media and political establishment that ignores 800 daily deaths of poor and low-wealth people," said Barber. "Poverty by America is an abolishable and unnecessary reality that can be eradicated by enacting policies that address the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of healthcare, militarism, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism."

"When our politics makes it easier to get a gun than to get food, quality education, living wages, or healthcare," he added, "then there's a problem with the soul of our nation."