If A Candidate Doesn't Back Unions, They Should Stop Fouling The Democratic Brand
I lived in Suffolk County for about 4 years. It was a pretty conservative place— a lot of rural— but we had a Democratic congressman when I was there, albeit a conservative one, Otis Pike. Now it’s like a giant suburb— and the second most populated county in New York, after Brooklyn. Most of Suffolk County is in NY-01, Nick LaLota’s district. LaLota had an especially awful opponent, fake-Democrat John Avlon, infamous as an anti-union fanatic who idolized Rahm Emanuel and Scott Walker, who other anti-union fanatics. Unlike Emanuel and Avlon, Walker has always been open and proud to be a Republican. LaLota shouldn’t have had such an easy road to reelection… but the Democrats keep nominating right-wing candidates in the hope of capturing Republican and Republican-leaning voters. It doesn’t work, but it’s been the basis of the DCCC’s strategy since Emanuel was chair almost 2 decades ago.
The difference between them was 11.4 points, the exact differential between Trump and Harris. No one knows what would happen if a working class-friendly candidate ran in NY-01 instead of GOP-lite corporate shills like Avlon, who flushed nearly $4 million down the toilet, not counting another $3.7 million from, WelcomePAC (their biggest investment this cycle)— the anti-progressive operation financed by right-of-center billionaire “Democrats” like Reid Hoffman, the Walton family and the Murdoch family. Is someone who has made a public name for himself as an anti-union fanatic and whose election is financed by the people who financed Avlon’s likely to be a champion for the working class?
Short answer is no, absolutely not. But Noah Smith, an opponent of class politics, puts in another way: America doesn’t really have a working class. He’s dead wrong, of course, but that didn't stop him from trying to demean Bernie’s analysis— “What were they going to do to address the fact that so many people in America are struggling? Does it have anything to do with the greed of corporate America? The fact that you have a billionaire class that wants it all, they want to own the political system? Does anybody really talk about the degree to which the people on top own this country and want more and more and couldn’t give a damn about ordinary Americans?”— of Trump’s win last week. Smith: “A postindustrial economy like America’s has a whole lot of workers, but no real working class. That’s why if Democrats want to win back lower-earning and non-college voters, I think they’ll have to appeal to them as Americans, rather than as one side of a class struggle. Bernie Sanders’ class politics may have felt like a refreshing alternative to racial identitarianism back in 2016, but they’re really something out of another age. Therefore I think that while Democrats should definitely address pocketbook issues, the idea that lower-earning and non-college Americans can be motivated to rise up against the rich with some combination of pro-union policy, more health care subsidies, higher minimum wage, and fiery rhetoric against billionaires is probably fanciful. As much as people might like class war to be an easy off-the-shelf substitute for identity politics, it’s unlikely to be any more successful.”
Pramila was showing this to her colleagues in the House this week:
It fits in well with Alex Seitz-Wald’s report for NBC on Monday about union leaders saying the it is time for the Democratic Party to be reconstructed. LIUNA president Brent Booker: “I don’t think the party has fully embraced, and hasn’t for decades, really, working-class people. We have to deconstruct and reconstruct the Democratic Party if they’re going to be the party of working people.”
Union membership has cratered over the past 50 years, so union leaders say there is only so much they can do in a world where 9 in 10 workers are not unionized and larger trends are cleaving workers from the Democratic Party.
“We can’t communicate with every nonunion laborer. We can only communicate with a portion of our members,” said Booker, who thinks Democrats could have performed better with a fierier populist message on the economy and a cooler one on cultural issues that make some of his members feel like Democrats are out-of-touch elitists. “A lot of our members own guns. A lot of our members hunt.”
Booker said that when he toured job sites this year, he heard about inflation, immigration and the demise of the Keystone Pipeline, which would have created jobs for his members but was killed for environmental concerns— all issues that played to the GOP’s favor.
Defining the working class is tricky in a postindustrial economy. But whether they are measured by income or educational attainment, President-elect Donald Trump won working-class voters overall while he made strong gains among nonwhite working-class voters like Hispanics and Asian Americans.
As recently as 2012, non-college-educated voters were splitting their votes evenly or even slightly in favor of Democrats. This year, they broke 2-to-1 for Trump over Harris, according to NBC News exit polls. And while former President Barack Obama won 57% of people making $30,000 to $49,999 in 2012, Trump won that income bracket 53%-45% this year.
As educated professionals who used to vote Republican recoiled from Trump, Democrats have become more affluent and educated. But that has left the party’s leaders, donors, operatives and other decision-makers more removed from the lives of low- and middle-income workers, some labor leaders say.
…Democrats have tried to win back working-class voters with policies designed to help them, especially by supporting unions.
The theory, accepted as a truism on the left, is that good policy leads to good politics and that people will reward you with their votes if you do things to make their lives better. But the results of that strategy have been disappointing.
Biden went all in on unions. One of his first actions as president was an $83 billion taxer-funded bailout of the Teamsters pension fund. He even launched his second presidential campaign from a Teamsters hall in Pittsburgh, saying: “I make no apologies. I am a union man.”
But the Teamsters could not return the favor. After surveys of their roughly 1.3 million rank-and-file members found that 60% supported Trump while only 34% supported Harris, Teamsters leaders decided not to endorse anyone.
Most unions still backed Harris, as is typical for a Democratic presidential candidate, but the Teamsters were not the only union to break from the precedent. The International Association of Fire Fighters and the International Longshoremen’s Association, both of which backed Biden in 2020, and the United Mine Workers of America all sat out the race entirely.
That despite Biden’s embracing organized labor’s policy wish list, from pro-union appointments to the National Labor Relations Board to executive actions to strengthen unions, while potentially creating millions of union jobs through massive spending on infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductors. Biden was even the first president to walk a strike picket line.
I hope you don’t have to be reminded who Nebraska’s recent independent Senate candidate, Dan Osborn, is. Take a look at his performance in his Senate race:
Alas, he didn’t win in a very Trumpy environment. But 435,663 Nebraskans voted for him (46.6% of voters). There were absolutely voters who cast ballots for Trump and for Dan. Now look at Kamala Harris’ sad performance in Nebraska on the same day:
She took 66,369 fewer votes— and his 46.6% looks a lot better than her 39.1%. She won 2 counties Douglas (Omaha) and Lancaster (Lincoln). Osborn won each of them far more strongly than she did and he also won Thurston and Sarpy counties and was competitive in Dodge, Hall, Dakota, Cass, Saline, Otoe, Johnson and Gage counties. Harris was not competitive in any of those counties.
The third chart was for a special election for the other Senate seat in which Democrat Preston Love was crushed by incumbent (and former governor) Pete Ricketts, who drew more voters than Trump. 86,459 Nebraskans who voted for Osborn didn’t vote for Love.
Yesterday, Jonathan Weisman looked at how Osborn thinks he did it and why he calls his “almost success” a clue “to how a more populist approach could wrest the working class from Republicans, not through partisan warfare but class consciousness. ‘Who’s the one doing the dividing here?’ Osborn asked in an interview on Monday. ‘I think it’s the people who are laughing all the way to the bank while us common folk live paycheck to paycheck.’”
On Tuesday, Osborn, 49, will return to work as a union steamfitter in Omaha, facing a pile of bills from his time off campaigning, including a $4,000 veterinarian’s bill for the Addison’s disease his dog developed during the election year. He is also announcing a new super PAC, the Working Class Heroes Fund, to try to recruit more blue-collar workers to run for office, and to organize the working class to vote in their economic self-interest.
“I just think it means everything that working people have a seat at the table because we have enough, you know, high-profile lawyers and business execs,” Osborn said. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t have a seat at the table. Of course they should for what they’ve accomplished in their lives. But I feel like what I’ve accomplished as a working person, although it’s not as glittery and glorious as a C.E.O. starting a company, I’ve certainly given my family a good life.”
…He tried to prove his independence with a pro-gun, tough-on-the-border message, but he also favored abortion rights and new rules to make it easier for unions to organize.
Mainly, though, his biggest calling card was his genuine working-class identity and a penchant for listening. It wasn’t a particularly substantive campaign— he still struggles to articulate the policies that distinguished him from Republicans and Democrats— but it was one that avoided the impression that many Democrats leave, that in appealing to working-class voters, they talk down to them.
… The most resonant issues, he said, revolved around the yawning wealth gap between the billionaire classes on the coasts and virtually everyone else in the middle. Advocacy, he said, should not be built around forcing everyone to share but creating “an equal playing field” where “mom-and-pop shops” are able to compete with prices of chain stores like the Dollar Generals commonplace in Nebraska’s small towns.
Stanley Greenberg made the case that Trump won “because he was the change candidate who championed working-class discontent… Harris had been speaking to more powerful currents of working-class discontent, and that put her in the lead. She promised to help with the cost of living, blamed monopolies for inflation, and vowed to shift power from the billionaires to the middle class. But she became ambivalent about championing those changes. That allowed Trump to regain momentum and win.”
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