As you probably saw, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters chose not to endorse either candidate for president this year. On the one hand, this is surprising. The Democratic party has been able to count on endorsements from the national labor movement for many decades now. On the other hand, the Teamsters have skewed somewhat right compared to their peers, endorsing, for example, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and Bush in 1988. They also withheld an endorsement in the 1996 race between Clinton and Dole.
So, this is not as much of a man bites dog story as might initially seem as it relates specifically to the Teamsters. The Teamsters had also conducted fairly extensive polling and had run national straw polls at member meetings across the country. In the straw polls, which occurred first, while Biden was still running, and which took place in public forums where speakers have the opportunity to influence other participants, and where the participants are a more self-selected lot, Biden received more support than Trump but not by much - 44 to 36. In two polls after Harris became the nominee, both concluding September 15th, Trump led 60 to 34 and 58 to 31. Here's the Teamsters’ own description of the polling.
Before telling ourselves that this is a particular Teamsters dynamic, another poll from February of this year showed Biden leading Trump among union households by a margin of 50 to 41. This measured support among all union households, not just the Teamsters. Not only didn't Biden do much better than Trump among union households, he did seven points worse than exit polls suggest he did in the 2020 election when he carried these voter by a margin of 56 to 40.
My conclusions? The February poll showing Biden with a 9-point lead is not meaningfully different from the Teamsters straw poll taken while Biden was still in the race and showing him with an 8-point lead. This suggests to me that the sentiment among Teamsters members is not likely that different from typical union members across the country; union members, generally, have probably moved towards Trump since Biden dropped out. Taken in total, these polls also say to me that the teamster's president, Sean O'Brien, was doing a decent job of representing his membership’s sentiments by pushing forward with this non endorsement.
Two additional questions jump out at me. First, why was Biden's lead earlier this year so much smaller than his lead on election Day in 2020 according to those exit polls; and second, why is Harris doing markedly worse with this group than Biden was.
Here I'll just speculate; this is not based on data. I think a lot of union members are primarily focused on holding on to what they have and perhaps improving their situation incrementally over time - and not having things taken away from them as a result of corporate downsizing/rightsizing etc. They value their membership in unions for very kitchen table/economic security oriented reasons. Protecting workers in these kinds of ways has always been at the core of the union movement. Joe Biden is as old school a politician as you could find today in American politics. I think most union members get that he gets what matters to them in this most basic way.
However, they also probably sense a drift leftward in the Democratic Party on non-economic, social and cultural issues. It's not that some number of union members don't care about these issues but rather that they are not central to the quality of their day in and day out lives. Nor are they central to their membership in unions. And to the extent that the embrace of “wokeism" or DEI oriented thinking in the Democratic party has seemed to increase, some union members may feel that the core economic focus of their union membership and political activism is being diluted. They may have sensed this over the past four years, accounting for Biden's fall-off with the group since 2020, and they may connect Harris to this leftward drift of the party more than the old school Biden, accounting for some of her poorer numbers with the group.
What, for example, might a traditional union member make of the national UAW's going out of its way to endorse a ceasefire in Gaza and explore divestment from Israel? Whatever you might think about who's right or wrong in the Middle East, you might very fairly ask the question, what the hell does this have to do with the wages and working conditions of union members in America?
While the Republican Party has clearly not been a friend of organized labor, the national agenda of the Democratic Party does not 100% sync up with what is most important to a large number of union members. I think the poll numbers reflect this dynamic.
Matt thank you for this! Great article
Hmmm. A large portion of Teamsters and UAW members fall into MAGA's core demographic. I suspect that has more to do with Dems' weakness than perceptions of Left fervor. Or, those megative perceptions are intrinsically tied to the attractiveness of MAGA reactionary foundations.