New York Times
By Noam Schieber
January 29, 2016
Of
all the voters who might be expected to resist the charms of Donald J.
Trump, the two million members of the Service Employees International
Union would most likely
be near the top of the list.
The
union, which endorsed Hillary Clinton in November, is widely regarded
as one of the more progressive in the labor movement. It skews female
and racially diverse —
roughly the opposite of a Trump rally, in other words.
But
the union’s president, Mary Kay Henry, acknowledged that Mr. Trump
holds appeal even for some of her members. “There is deep economic
anxiety among our members and
the people we’re trying to organize that I believe Donald Trump’s
message is tapping into,” Ms. Henry said.
In
expressing her concern, Ms. Henry reflected a different form of anxiety
that is weighing on some union leaders and Democratic operatives: their
fear that Mr. Trump,
if not effectively countered, may draw an unusually large number of
union voters in a possible general election matchup. This could, in
turn, bolster Republicans in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Michigan and Wisconsin, all of which President Obama
won twice.
The
source of the attraction to Mr. Trump, say union members and leaders,
is manifold: the candidate’s unapologetically populist positions on
certain economic issues,
particularly trade; a frustration with the impotence of conventional
politicians; and above all, a sense that he rejects the norms of
Washington discourse.
“They
feel he’s the one guy who’s saying what’s on people’s minds,” Thomas
Hanify, the president of the Indiana state firefighters union, said of
his rank and file.
Mr.
Hanify said that Mr. Trump has so far dominated the “firehouse chatter”
in his state. While he allowed that his members tilt Republican, he
estimated that most followed
the lead of the union’s international leadership and supported Mr.
Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Ms.
Henry and other labor leaders remain confident that they can keep their
members in the fold by making a case that the Republicans’ economic
agenda, including Mr. Trump’s,
runs counter to the interests of working people. But they also see Mr.
Trump as posing particular risks.
“Anyone
who talks about dividing people in the country as a solution is a
threat to the country, to democracy, the economy, and to working people,
and we take every one
of those seriously,” said Richard L. Trumka, the president of the
A.F.L.-C.I.O.
The
potential pairing of Mr. Trump and union members could be helped along
by a sense that Mr. Trump, unlike more conventional Republicans, has
historically enjoyed a
cordial relationship with labor on many of his real estate projects.
“He
has put his fair share into hiring union people,” said Richard Sabato,
the president of a building and construction trades council in northern
New Jersey. “He’s done
that in Manhattan, in New Jersey.”
But
that is not always the case. The owners of Trump International Hotel
Las Vegas filed objections to a recent vote by roughly 500 of its
workers to unionize, and the
National Labor Relations Board has found merit to the claims that the
hotel violated workers’ labor rights. (The Trump campaign did not
respond to requests for comment.)
Mr.
Sabato said that his members, who lean Republican but in many cases
voted for Mr. Obama, would “march behind” Mr. Trump on the issue of
illegal immigration.
Even
more important for many union members has been the issue of economic
globalization. Mr. Trump has railed against the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, the 12-country trade
deal the administration finished negotiating last year. And he has
bemoaned the administration’s failure to stand up to what he and many
union members see as China’s mercantilist policies.
He
has also fulminated against plans by the company that owns Nabisco to
shift some production to Mexico — “I love Oreos,” he said, “I will never
eat them again” — and
vowed to impose a punishing tariff on imports of Ford cars unless the
company canceled a $2.5 billion investment in plants in that country.
“We
like that he does not support TPP, that he has taken the position that
there should be trade tariffs for a company that moves jobs overseas,”
said Ryan Leenders, 30,
a member of the International Association of Machinists in Washington
State. Mr. Leenders, who estimated that one-quarter to one-third of his
factory’s union workers were Trump supporters, said he voted for Mr.
Obama in 2008 and wrote in Ron Paul in 2012.
Reflecting
the anti-establishment mood that has engulfed parts of the labor
movement, Mr. Leenders said he believed that more than half of his
union’s workers support
Senator Bernie Sanders, while very few support Mrs. Clinton, despite
the fact that the machinists union endorsed her last summer. (A
machinists spokesman said that, “At this point, any estimates of support
for a candidate are more a passing snapshot of popularity.”)
Many
union officials are grappling with a similar dynamic, including the
Teamsters, whose members have a “Teamsters for Trump” Facebook page,
with more than 650 likes.
John
Bulgaro, the president of Teamsters Local 294 in Albany, said that Mr.
Trump had generated excitement among his members, but that “a lot of
people like Bernie Sanders.”
He cautioned that they would need to hear more about Mr. Trump’s
position on labor rights.
To
be sure, polling of union voters shows that Mrs. Clinton remains
broadly popular and would carry most Sanders supporters in a matchup
against Mr. Trump. But the same
polling suggests that Mr. Trump could perform unusually well among
these voters for a Republican nominee.
Christopher
M. Shelton, the president of the Communications Workers of America,
which endorsed Mr. Sanders in December, said that while polling of his
members showed Mr.
Trump’s support lagging far behind support for Mr. Sanders and Mrs.
Clinton, it was higher than Republican presidential candidates typically
net.
Despite
Mr. Trump’s appeal, particularly among white working-class men,
longtime labor officials and political operatives point out that Mr.
Trump’s popularity before
a single primary vote has been cast is a vastly different proposition
than whether he would be able to retain that support in the fall.
“In
every election around this time there are stories suggesting that union
members will defect — ‘Oh, white union men won’t vote for Obama,’”
Steve Rosenthal, a former
political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and progressive political
organizer, wrote in an email response to questions.
In
the end, Mr. Rosenthal said, union voters almost always end up voting
overwhelmingly Democratic in presidential elections. White male union
members favored Mr. Obama
in 2008, and John Kerry in 2004, by roughly 20 percentage points,
according to polling commissioned by the A.F.L.-C.I.O., even as white
men over all favored the Republican candidate by a large margin.
Mr.
Rosenthal said that unions have proved adept at building support among
their members for Democratic nominees who generally embrace their
economic agenda and at undermining
support for Republicans.
In
a recent study of working-class voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania based
on over 1,500 interviews, Working America, a labor-affiliated group,
found genuine support for
Mr. Trump among Democrats. But Matt Morrison, the group’s deputy
director, said that many Trump supporters were receptive to information
that suggested a gap between the candidate’s words and deeds.
“Just
delivering a little bit of new information, we could see that his brand
takes a hit,” Mr. Morrison said, referring to reports that Mr. Trump
may have used undocumented
workers on some of his development projects.
Other
experts cautioned that even if Mr. Trump were to retain substantial
support among white male union members without college degrees, that
would not necessarily yield
him an electoral advantage in November if he became the Republican
nominee.
The
voters whom labor unions must typically work the hardest to turn out,
like younger voters and Latinos, “are groups that will be highly
motivated” against Mr. Trump,
said Guy Molyneux, a pollster who has surveyed union voters extensively
over the years.
Mr.
Molyneux also said that many of the union voters attracted by Mr. Trump
were among the 30 percent of union voters who already vote reliably
Republican.
Still,
unlike most other Republicans, whose appeal to union voters rarely
extends beyond cultural issues like gun rights, Mr. Trump’s economic
pronouncements have a greater
potential to scramble the standard political calculus.
“I
do think that Trump is a threat,” said Mike Lux, a progressive activist
who is a former labor official and veteran of President Bill Clinton’s
administration. “If the
Democratic nominee is Hillary, and she’s mushy at all on the trade
issue, Trump will take that issue and drive it and drive it and drive
it.”
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