Why Trump Could Win the Union Vote

On the eve of the 2020 election, Joe Biden vowed to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen.” Since taking office, he has followed through on that promise, nominating a former union official as secretary of labor, filling the National Labor Relations Board with pro-union appointees and becoming the first sitting president to join a picket line.

Yet Biden’s support from union members—and workers more generally—is remarkably weak. An October New York Times/Siena poll of six swing states found Donald Trump and Biden tied among union members (the same voters said they had favored Biden in 2020 by eight points). Far from being limited to the white working class, this disaffection is spreading to working-class people of color. As Trump himself said at a rally in Waukesha, Wis., on May 1, “We’ve become the party of the worker. We’ve become the party of the middle income.”

What accounts for Biden’s weakness with such voters? Despite the president’s pro-union policies, many working-class voters believe that the Democratic Party does not understand, or is even hostile to, their cultural priorities and economic interests. In the minds of many of them, Trump’s GOP simply takes these concerns more seriously.

The recent bestseller “White Rural Rage,” by Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller, offers a different explanation for why much of the working class has defected to the GOP. They argue that the political shift among non-metropolitan Americans is primarily motivated by resentments against immigrants, minorities and city dwellers. Another theory is that these voters have been fooled by online disinformation. As New York magazine put it in the wake of the 2016 election, “Trump won because of Facebook,” which had failed to police “hoax or fake news.”

To be sure, voters of all stripes—including the urban and the educated—harbor various resentments. And there is no denying that social media is awash with false claims. What these accounts tend to ignore is the substantive reasons for this political shift: Many workers don’t endorse the wider agenda of the Democratic Party and are attracted to Trump’s policy priorities.

In “Rust Belt Union Blues,” their 2023 study of blue-collar workers in western Pennsylvania, Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol describe how, in the past, “voting Democrat was not just about particular issues for unionized workers; instead, it was in large part about socially embedded identities and mutualities—about who they were.” Unions did more than promise better wages and benefits. They also organized bingo nights, sports leagues and holiday parties, giving an all-encompassing social meaning to being a “union man.”

Today, however, union membership no longer holds the same social and cultural significance. Much of what remains of the labor movement, moreover, acts as an adjunct to the Democratic Party and channels the outlook of its dominant professional class. In the AFL-CIO’s May Day message this year, for instance, concerns about climate change and the welfare of migrants competed with the defense of workers’ rights. These views aren’t necessarily shared by rank-and-file union members, much less by the working class a whole.

As Newman and Skocpol observe, voting is “driven in large part by social identity: by how people see themselves within their communities and their perceptions of who is (and who is not) on their side.” Today’s Democratic leaders package pro-union measures and rhetoric within a larger worldview—on issues like religion, patriotism, gender and law enforcement—that many working-class Americans find alienating. Trump’s GOP better reflects the social identity of lunch-bucket Americans. It is also more attentive to their material interests on two crucial issues: immigration and energy.

The Democratic establishment often sees Americans who reject the free movement of immigrant labor as animated solely by xenophobia. But this view fails to reckon with the fact that a majority of Hispanics favor tighter restrictions, with 42% supporting a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and more than a third backing the deportation of all illegal immigrants, according to a recent Axios poll.

A better explanation for workers’ skepticism is that unskilled migration puts downward pressure on their wages. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman observed almost two decades ago, “many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration.” Because such newcomers “have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans.”

In addition, low-wage migration strains the welfare safety net that native-born workers rely on—a fact underscored by the Clinton-era U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which found that the migration of unskilled workers squeezes state and local budgets, especially for public education. Trump has made hay of this issue on the campaign trail. Biden, he declared recently, “is spending billions and billions of dollars on hotel rooms for illegal aliens…and our soldiers, our veterans are laying on streets not being taken care of.”

Then there is the green-energy transition. In March, the Biden administration announced a rule effectively requiring automakers to build more electric cars by tightening restrictions on tailpipe pollution. The powerful nonprofits, green industries and progressive asset managers that set the Democratic agenda welcome such moves. But these measures are unpopular among voters more generally; Americans oppose phasing out gasoline cars by 19 points.

For non-metropolitan workers more likely to be employed in transportation or manufacturing, or to rely on personal vehicles to get around, these policies look like an attack on their livelihoods. Trump has played up this class angle, telling rallygoers, “Crooked Joe is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to give $7,500 tax credits to rich people who buy electric cars.” Opposition to green-energy policies has the potential to bring organized labor in key sectors over to the GOP, notwithstanding the party’s fraught relations with unions.

It’s true that under the Biden administration, the labor movement has scored some wins, most notably a strong new United Auto Workers’ contract with the Big Three automakers in Detroit, as well as a newly unionized UAW shop in the union-unfriendly South. Despite Trump’s success with union households in 2016, moreover, his record on labor issues in his first term was often indistinguishable from that of any other union-busting Republican president.

Still, Trump’s broader pro-worker appeal has blunted the political effects of Biden’s pro-union policies. Trump turned tariffs against China into a point of bipartisan consensus, and he has helped the GOP overcome its reputation as a party devoted to cutting Social Security and Medicare, the entitlements that American workers rely on for retirement.

Consolidating the GOP’s working-class gains in a second term would require outreach to the friendlier corners of the labor movement, especially in the trades and manufacturing. Already there are small signs of a rapprochement. While most labor leaders back Biden, one union, the Teamsters, has met with Trump and, according to a Federal Election Commission report, donated $45,000 to the Republican National Committee.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the highest marginal share of union households for a Republican nominee in nearly two generations. If in November he manages to carry crucial battleground states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, it will be in part because voters have concluded—not without reason—that Trump is the working-class candidate.

Matthew Schmitz and Sohrab Ahmari are the founders and editors of Compact magazine.