Labor Leaders Launch Tour to Turn Workers Against Trump
By Eric Levitz
August 21, 2017
2:42 pm
Last fall, Donald Trump won the GOP an unusually high share of union members’ votes. For the first time since 1984, the Republican standard-bearer only lost union households by a single-digit margin — a feat made all the more impressive when one considers that organized labor has become less white, and more concentrated in the public sector, since Ronald Reagan won his second term.
By appealing to the racial grievances and economic anxieties of working-class whites in the Rust Belt — while disavowing his party’s historic opposition to Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure stimulus, trade protection, and universal health care — Trump kicked bricks out of the Democratic Party’s “blue wall.”
Were Trump a more broadly popular — and less wholly incompetent — president, he could have spent the past seven months strengthening the GOP’s grip over Team Blue’s old labor strongholds, while turning the Democratic Party against itself. While Trump’s overt racism and misogyny rendered him instantly toxic to the progressive base, a declining (and freshly humbled) labor movement wasn’t willing to forfeit any hope of influencing the new president’s agenda on trade and labor rights for solidarity’s sake. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka agreed to sit on Trump’s manufacturing council, in hopes of claiming victories for his membership on trade and infrastructure.
Meanwhile, ten Senate Democrats are looking to win reelection in 2018, in states Trump won last fall. Most of these lawmakers were eager to buttress their bipartisan credentials by working with the new president on the more popular planks for his platform.
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