Federal job guarantees are a throwback idea. President Franklin D. Roosevelt essentially called for them in his “Second Bill of Rights” speech in 1944, which held that Americans had “the right to a useful and remunerative job” and “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed the idea in the 1960s.

A handful of liberal researchers have revived and promoted such a plan in recent years, including Mark Paul, William A. Darity Jr. of Duke University and Darrick Hamilton of the New School. Last year, the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank stacked with veterans of the Obama administration, released a job guarantee proposal that would employ an estimated 4.4 million Americans. Last Tuesday, the group released a follow-up plan that detailed how it would guarantee jobs to Americans who live in particularly distressed communities, urban and rural.

Mr. Booker’s plan would create pilot programs to provide jobs to Americans in as many as 15 areas where the unemployment rate remains dismal. Its co-sponsors include three Democratic senators also seen as possible presidential candidates: Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman, would fund “transitional” jobs lasting up to one year for workers who have been unemployed for six months or more. Representative Ro Khanna of California would provide federally subsidized employment, in the public or private sector, for anyone who wants to work, for a maximum period of two and a half years.

The most ambitious proposal, an outline from Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and another possible White House hopeful, would promise a government job in areas such as construction, child care and park maintenance to anyone who wants one, paying a “living wage” and offering benefits on par with what current federal employees earn.

Behind the stampede is Democrats’ desire for tangible programs to offer to working-class voters, which they could contrast to Mr. Trump’s racially divisive immigration appeals to white workers.