Candidates from both parties say they want more apprenticeships and jobs and generalized things and stuff of that nature. Elected leaders have done comparatively little, though, to improve public systems that don’t produce the quality and number of apprenticeships and jobs we want.

We’re five weeks from Election Day in what looks like an awfully important midterm election in the United States. Early voting is starting, and what candidates stand for is mostly set.

And when an American political candidate talks about getting more people into jobs that need filling, here’s usually what they say:

I’m exaggerating, clearly, but this isn’t that far off from what I’ve nicknamed “The Standard Apprenticeships and Stuff Platform” because it (1) specifically mentions apprenticeships and (2) is pretty “and stuff”-y when it comes to what the candidate actually wants and how they plan to get it (including the aforementioned apprenticeships).

It’s a strikingly bipartisan phenomenon, as you can see in some of the closest and most consequential races in the country. Here’s “Apprenticeships and Stuff” in Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s platform.

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, “Apprenticeships and Stuff” also shows up in the gubernatorial platform of Ohio Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy says he will “[e]xpand career-technical education and apprenticeships to create real pathways to good-paying jobs.”

In another close gubernatorial race, Rick Jackson, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Georgia, says he will

And Rep. Chris Pappas, the Democratic nominee for Senate in New Hampshire, talks about his record of

In other words, the most liberal candidates and the most conservative candidates seem to have the same ambitions: more apprenticeships, improved technical education and workforce programs, and stuff.

Of course, apprenticeships and effective workforce programs are things that American political leaders really, really suck at delivering on, especially some of the candidates in these tight elections that talk up their workforce funding track records.

Even with a lot of money and political effort from the past two administrations, federally Registered Apprenticeship—the only flavor of apprenticeships we can actually track somewhat consistently—remains well below more than one million active apprentices, the Trump Administration’s big workforce goal. The rest of public workforce funding is tied up in systems that favor low-paying jobs and can’t provide the basic support to help workers to make it to training, let alone get them through it.

So, while there’s plenty of broad political will for The Standard Apprenticeship and Stuff Platform, the policy effort just isn’t there. In the spring, I was at a House hearing on a potential replacement for the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, America’s main source of workforce dollars. Lawmakers of both parties seem to acknowledge that the workforce structures we have now are not built for this moment. But the closest thing to a plan with political legs would be… more of the same structures that are not built for this moment.

For the record, I’m not expecting every candidate to produce a deep policy paper on how they would fix federal workforce development programs. What I am asking for—and what I suspect a lot of voters would love—is actual commitments and plans that go beyond “Apprenticeships and jobs are good.”

So why don’t we have those things already? And how can we get them?

Here’s the prevailing wisdom in D.C., which people in politics—especially those on the Hill—will tell you quite freely: few of their bosses really care about workforce programs. These issues seem too niche and too nerdy. In turn, they’re seen as politically unworthy of the effort needed for change. I would add to that dashes of “It’s not like we can do anything to get people hired” and “If we just say we’re doing something, people will think we are.”

Constructively and politely, this increasingly feels like one of those times where very smart and capable people miss the obvious.

If you haven’t noticed, every election is an economic election and every election is a jobs election. People’s economic outlook is shaped by what they make at their jobs, and I rarely meet anyone who thinks America makes it easy to get a job that pays well.

A job also isn’t just a job. Whether you have a decent job often determines whether you have insurance that lets you go to the doctor when you get sick—or whether you can take time off to get better. A dependable job can determine whether a lender or landlord will allow you to buy or rent a safe, comfortable place to live.

Workforce policy is how we collectively make it easier for people to move into better jobs while helping employers find the talent they need to do whatever they do.

In that sense, then, every election is not just a jobs or economic election, but a workforce election. That seems especially true this year with the possibility of AI-related job loss hanging over many voters—and few clear ideas in Washington of how to deal with it.

So why isn’t workforce a bigger electoral issue? Well, there are a few reasons for that.

One, to give credit to the prevailing political wisdom, the experts that political leaders talk to most about workforce do talk about it in ways that make it seem like a niche issue. This is a very thinktank-y field, and veterans of the federal workforce system or its orbit tend to make up much of the field’s leadership. In turn, that’s buried policy conversations in WIOA trivia and other workforce-y terms of art. The average worker and employer can’t relate.

That’s been a restrictor plate—and in time, possibly a mortal blow—to the effectiveness of the policy underlying the Trump workforce agenda. The Administration had a brief window when it could have made profound changes to American workforce as institutions and leaders jumped to paint the 2024 election as a turning point for the country. It didn’t take advantage of that window because it’s caught up on things like WIOA waivers, in addition to not courting voices on the other side of the aisle surprisingly open to some of the bigger changes the White House called for.

Two, because political leaders see workforce as a niche issue, there isn’t much political imagination as to what change could look like. Legislatively, that thickens the roots of the current systems.

Our current workforce programs are leftovers of a century of economic and anti-poverty initiatives. They’ve stayed in place with some tweaks because those leftovers are all lawmakers think is possible (and whether those specific programs live or die is all they get asked about by stakeholders). Broader change has more political support than lawmakers think—something that should be clear from the similarities in the far-right and far-left platforms I quote above. Lawmakers just can’t think of anything other than what’s come before.

Three, lawmakers and their staff don’t feel like they have much in the way of a clear pathway forward on what they should be doing beyond the status quo with a sporty new hat (and some glitter).This is the criticism I hear the most from the Hill, and I agree with it.

Most of what’s sent lawmakers’ way are complaints about the current systems, not ideas for how to fix them. Complaints are white noise to lawmakers and their staff. And that white noise doesn’t provide lawmakers much to go on for what they should be doing instead.

How do we start to fix that? Commitment and clarity.

If you look at the platforms above, the candidates aren’t really committing to anything in particular. A candidate saying they want more apprenticeships has the substantive heft of saying “I like sunshine” and “I want to eat more pizza.” There’s nothing much to hold them accountable to in those statements. Better yet, should more apprenticeships and/or pizza emerge, they still can take credit for it even if they didn’t do anything. They said they liked those pizza/apprenticeship stuff and then pizza/apprenticeship stuff happened!

What we don’t have is something clear for those candidates to commit to. I’m going to give an example that might seem out of pocket, but it’s certainly tangible and, um, relevant in the current environment: the attempted elimination of the Department of Education. When I was reporting on the campaign trail nearly 20 years ago, I saw the effects of Ed opponents pushing Republican candidates hard to say they supported killing that agency. Like, even if they were running for sheriff or sanitation commissioner.

That was a clear ask. Candidates kept making commitments. And in time, well, um, someone tried to kill Ed.

That’s obviously not the most comfortable of examples, but the point is this: as a field, we’re nowhere near that kind of clarity in terms of what we want from American workforce policy. We don’t have much for candidates to commit to.

Take apprenticeship, for example: how do we want to get more apprenticeships?

The field has a lot of different answers, from a new National Apprenticeship Act (although what that specifically looks like is incredibly fuzzy) to more apprenticeship funding to more apprenticeship degrees. And while there are certainly calls for more apprenticeship funding, I haven’t seen the type of push for commitments from elected leaders to actually deliver it.

You don’t get what you don’t ask for.

Every election is a workforce election.

So what are we asking for in the races to come?