After historic speech by Teamsters president at RNC, it's clear Democrats no longer have a hold on labour vote
At DNC, Sen. Bernie Sanders questions why historically anti-labour GOP has made inroads with working class
During a daytime labour council meeting at the Democratic National Convention, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders stood at the podium, booming against Donald Trump in his typically blunt manner: explaining how he had eroded democracy, divided the country and sold out the working class.
Then, Sanders got quiet.
"When you're a phony and a fraud billionaire like Donald Trump, why is it — now here is the hard question, and don't slump it off," he told the crowd. "How come a majority of working class people are supporting him?"
It's an uncomfortable question that the Democratic Party, which has traditionally held the support of organized labour, has had to grapple with in recent years.
Various polling shows that Republicans are leading Democrats with white, working class voters without a college degree, including a New York Times/Siena poll released in April, before Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Harris is now trying to regain some of the ground lost by the current president, as Trump and the Republican Party continue to court voters from working class and union households.
And while Democrats still have the majority support of union voters, a Pew Research poll from last year found that almost 40 per cent of registered voters who are in a union are Republicans.
"The labour vote is huge in this election," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told CBC News.
But, she said, "labour leaders are not monolithic. We do not have magic wands. Frankly, our unions are really democratic."
Some of those tensions have played out on convention stages. Harris received endorsements from a number of labour leaders on the first night of the Democratic convention, all of whom upheld her as a champion of the working class.
But just last month, Teamsters president Sean O'Brien gave an eyebrow-raising speech at the Republican convention, making an appeal to the party to support labour and calling Trump a "tough SOB" for surviving an assassination attempt. O'Brien then thanked Trump for opening the convention doors to a union president.
The speaking slot, which O'Brien called "unprecedented," marked the first time in the organization's 121-year history that a Teamsters leader spoke at the RNC.
"Never forget: American workers own this nation," O'Brien told delegates. "We are not renters, we are not tenants, but the corporate elite treat us like squatters, and that is a crime. We have got to fix it."
The Democrats did not invite O'Brien (whose union is one of the largest in the U.S. with 1.3 million members) to their convention, though he reportedly requested a speaking slot.
His address to the RNC was a firecracker of a speech that got a bemused but well-received response from the audience of Republicans, a historically anti-union party that has made further inroads with union voters for a variety of reasons.
"What happened at the RNC is a blip as far as I'm concerned, as far as everybody here in this room is concerned," said Larry Rousseau, the executive vice-president of the Canadian Labour Council, who was attending the same event where Sanders spoke.
"And I think the Teamsters are having a real internal discussion and debate as to who they should be endorsing."
Working-class shift began well before Trump
Sen. Sanders said the reason for the working class shift to the Republican Party is economic. "I think the answer is that a lot of people are hurting," he told the crowd, citing years of high inflation, expensive groceries and soaring housing costs.
Others disagree. "With all due respect to the senator from Vermont, that's not exactly right," said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.
"If it were simply a story of people feeling left behind, you'd expect to see some variation as the underlying economic conditions change."
He said the shift is partly tied to the "radical decline" of organized labour, which held the white working class within the Democratic Party's tent for a long time. And Republicans have capitalized on cultural issues that resonate more broadly with working-class voters, both white and non-white.
"I think that goes some way towards explaining this shift," Rosenfeld said. "But the shift goes a long way back, well before Trump arrived on the scene with his set of cultural grievances."
That's the position held by Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, who delivered a fiery speech during the Democratic convention and wore a T-shirt printed with the words "Trump is a scab."
Speaking during the same event as Sanders, Fain said that the Democratic Party had begun to lose its way with union voters decades ago during the Reagan and Bush administrations, moving further to the political centre and supporting big business "to make everybody happy."
"We're helping the [Democratic] party find its way back to its roots," he said, calling it a matter of moral clarity to stand with working-class people. "That's our fight."
Walz the modern face of a union voter?
Trump has, especially in rhetorical terms, found a niche with working-class voters. He's taken a protectionist stance on trade and has claimed that immigrants are taking American jobs. But some pundits say his policies contradict his messaging to workers, including tax cuts that would benefit the wealthy.
His opponents seized on a recent blunder, when Trump told Tesla founder Elon Musk during an interview that workers on strike lines should be fired. Still, the Democrats needn't sit back and relax.
"It is absolutely the case that Democrats are going to have to worry about further erosion among rural and exurban voters, especially those who aren't professional white-collar workers, because that is a long-term trend," said Rosenfeld.
Trump has been able to capture "a fraction of the population that might have leaned GOP when it came to their cultural views but were really repelled by the GOP standard economic take on economic issues."
Biden, who has positioned himself as the most pro-union president in U.S. history, lagged behind Trump in working class support. The Harris campaign is now trying to regain some of that ground, especially with the choice of Tim Walz, a former teacher, as the vice-presidential nominee.
Walz is popular with labour voters. His first solo event as a vice-presidential candidate was an address to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Los Angeles. When accepting his nomination at the DNC on Wednesday, he derided Trump's agenda as one that "serves nobody but the richest people."
He also emphasized his teaching background and vowed that Harris would stand up to corporate interests if elected president.
"That's how we'll keep moving forward. That's how we'll turn the page on Donald Trump," Walz told the crowd. "That's how we'll build a country where workers come first, health care and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of our bedrooms."
Rosenfeld said Walz reflects the modern face of the union movement.
"He's a public school teacher, right? That is where unions are anchored in the U.S. today," the sociologist said.
"Half of all union members now in the United States are in the public sector. These are not construction workers, where unionization rates have bottomed out. Walz is a much more typical union member."
Sanders, for his part, had a reminder for the crowd. That even at a week-long gathering for a union-friendly party, the "big boxes" in the DNC convention hall cost "hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars … paid for by the largest corporations in America."
"They're investing in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. They don't care who wins. They represent the one per cent," Sanders said.
"So, our job is to mobilize our people, as we represent the 99 per cent."
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With files from Katie Simpson