The Democrats’ pro-union strategy has been a bust

When Joe Biden took office, the Democratic Party had been bleeding support among working-class voters for decades.

At mid-century, America’s two parties were cleaved by class, with educated professionals backing the GOP and blue-collar workers voting Democratic. But starting in the 1960s, this class divide began narrowing gradually, as white voters with college diplomas drifted left while those without them shifted right, in a process political analysts have dubbed “education polarization.” By 2004, college graduates were more Democratic than working-class voters. And Donald Trump’s conquest of the GOP accelerated this realignment.

In 2016, for the first time since at least 1948 when the American National Election Studies (ANES) survey began collecting data, white voters in the top 5 percent of America’s income distribution voted for Democrats at a higher rate than those in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. This same pattern of support repeated in 2020, according to an analysis from Ohio State political scientist Tom Wood. In the latter election, Democrats also lost ground with nonwhite voters without college degrees, according to Catalist, a Democratic data firm.

The rightward drift of America’s working class disconcerted progressives, who generated a variety of ideas for reversing it. But one of their primary prescriptions could be summarized in a single word: unions.

After all, the erosion of Democrats’ working-class support had coincided with the collapse of organized labor in the United States. There were many reasons to think the latter had caused the former.

Thus, to prevent Democrats’ working-class support from diminishing further, the thinking went, the party needed to deliver for existing trade unions, whose demands Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had sometimes defied. Meanwhile, to lay the seeds for a broader realignment of working-class voters, Democrats needed to make it easier for workers to organize by reforming federal labor laws.

The Biden administration appears to have embraced this analysis. In his presidency’s first major piece of legislation, Biden bailed out the Teamsters’ pension funds, effectively transferring $36 billion to 350,000 of the union’s members. The president also appointed a staunchly pro-union federal labor board, encouraged union organizing at Amazon, walked a picket line with the United Auto Workers, and aligned Democratic trade and education policy with the AFL-CIO’s preferences. And although he failed to enact major changes to federal labor regulations, that was not for want of trying. In the estimation of labor historian Erik Loomis, Biden has been the most pro-union president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But the political return on Democrats’ investment in organized labor has been disappointing.

Last month, the Teamsters declined to make a presidential endorsement, after an internal survey found 60 percent of its membership backed Trump over Kamala Harris. In early October, the International Association of Fire Fighters also announced that they would not be making a presidential endorsement, despite backing Biden four years earlier.

These high-profile snubs — both driven by rank-and-file opposition to the Democratic nominee — may reflect a broader political trend. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, between 2012 and 2016, the Democratic presidential nominee’s share of union voters fell from 66 to 53 percent. Four years ago, Biden erased roughly half of that gap, claiming 60 percent of the union vote.

But contemporary polling indicates that Democrats have lost ground with unionized voters since then. In fact, according to an aggregation from CNN’s Harry Enten, Kamala Harris is on track to perform even worse with union households than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

Some on the left have a simple explanation for why a historically pro-union presidency hasn’t bought the Democrats many union votes: Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, and she lacks his credibility on labor issues. This theory is unsatisfying because Biden’s numbers with union voters early this year were roughly as bad as Harris’s are today. In February, NBC News found Biden winning only 50 percent of voters from union households.

All this raises the possibility that organized labor’s capacity to prevent working-class voters from drifting out of the Democratic tent is more limited than progressives had hoped.

None of this means that Democrats would derive no political benefit from a stronger labor movement. And it certainly does not undermine the substantive case for collective bargaining as a means of reducing inequality and safeguarding workers’ interests. But the trends outlined above suggest that delivering for unions and helping them expand may be insufficient to dramatically improve the party’s performance with working-class voters in general and white ones in particular.

Progressives have long believed that organized labor is a liberalizing force, and the notion that unions influence their members’ political views — to Democrats’ benefit — is far from baseless. The party consistently performs better with unionized voters than nonunionized ones. Historically, this held true within demographic groups, with unionized white workers backing Democrats at higher rates than their nonunionized counterparts.

Many unions also actively engage in politically educating their members. Theoretically, unions that represent diverse memberships should discourage racial prejudice, as solidarity is indispensable to successful organizing and labor actions. A 2021 paper by the political scientists Paul Frymer and Jacob Grumbach found that white voters who gained union membership between 2010 and 2016 tended to display lower levels of racial resentment after getting their union cards.

But there is reason to think that unions’ capacity to liberalize the views of non-college-educated voters has declined in the Trump era. According to the Democratic data scientist David Shor, his party’s “union premium” — the degree to which Democrats perform better with union voters, when controlling for all other demographic variables — dropped nearly to zero in 2020. Democrats still did better with unionized workers than nonunionized ones that year. Extrapolating from Shor’s math, this was almost entirely attributable to the demographic traits of America’s unionized population, which is more highly educated and less Southern than the American electorate.

More broadly, a recent study from Alan Yan, a political science graduate student at UC Berkeley, suggests that unions’ historical tendency to liberalize their members’ views has been widely exaggerated.

To evaluate the impact of union membership on voters’ political views, Yan examines 13 panel surveys — in other words, polls of the same group of voters across multiple election cycles — conducted between 1956 and 2020. He looks at voters’ preferred party and issue positions in the election year before they gained union membership and in subsequent elections, when they were unionized. Controlling for other variables, he finds that the typical voter’s views barely change at all upon joining a union.

Yan also offers some theoretical arguments for why this result makes sense. For one thing, political scientists generally believe that voters’ political identities tend to crystallize in early adulthood, much earlier than they usually gain union membership. By the time a given voter arrives in a unionized shop, therefore, their political views may be largely fixed.

Furthermore, many unions make little effort to politicize their memberships. In the 2016 Cooperative Election Study — a large sample survey — only 20 percent of union members reported frequent political discussions with coworkers, according to Yan, while 39 percent could not remember ever being contacted by their union in the previous two years.

Daniel Schlozman, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist whose work has focused on the relationship between organized labor and the Democratic Party, says that he finds Yan’s results unsurprising.

In many European countries in the early 20th century, unions often pervaded nearly every aspect of their members’ lives, not only mediating their workplace disputes, but providing gathering halls and clubs, mutual aid programs, and political parties. In that context, Schlozman would expect unions to shape the politics of their members more thoroughly. In the modern United States, by contrast — where unions have a light footprint outside the job site and myriad religious, ethnic, and ideological divisions inform voters’ politics — it makes sense that union leaders can’t dictate a party line to their members.

“In a big pluralistic country where we are not pillarized like Austria in the old days — where you join your union and then go to your social democratic stamp collecting club — union membership is just not going to be as powerful a force in determining political behavior” as other social attachments and identities, Schlozman said.

Still, there’s some reason to think that Yan’s paper understates unions’ political influence on their members. In an interview with Vox, Princeton political scientist Paul Frymer noted that during many of the years Yan studies — particularly in the 1950s and ’60s — many unions were still profoundly racist institutions, which one would scarcely expect to liberalize their memberships. “If a lot of unions are fighting integration, fighting immigrants, fighting the inclusion of Black Americans, of women,” Frymer said, “then yeah, that’s just going to create a push the other way.”

Yan and Frymer agree that some unions do successfully promote progressive political views among their members. But this requires both a leadership committed to evangelizing for liberal politics and a membership that’s open to such political messaging.

To the extent that education polarization and culture wars render many working-class union members skeptical of progressive messaging, their union leaders will have an incentive to back away from internal political advocacy. After all, such leaders ultimately need to win reelection in order to retain their positions. This could theoretically create a self-reinforcing dynamic in which the less Democratic a union’s members become, the less their leaders try to sell members on progressive politics, which then leads members to become even less Democratic.

As Yan notes, even teachers unions, whose members tend to be better educated than union members, often focus on compensation rather than partisan politics because the latter divides their memberships.

Further, in a 2020 survey experiment, researchers from Columbia and MIT measure how workers’ interest in joining a hypothetical labor organization changed as different characteristics of that union were emphasized. When told that this union would campaign for pro-worker politicians in elections, the surveyed workers became less likely to want to join. If this result is representative, then many union leaders have a structural incentive to focus narrowly on bread-and-butter issues and keep quiet about their Democratic sympathies (to the extent that they possess them).

All this said, Democrats are still likely to benefit politically from delivering for labor unions and helping them grow. Even if such organizations can’t persuade their more culturally conservative members to vote for Democrats, they can help to mobilize the progressives within their ranks, since unions are effective at promoting higher voter turnout.

Separately, unions are major funders of Democratic campaigns, with almost 90 percent of organized labor’s political contributions going into Democrats’ coffers.

And it is possible that a larger and more self-confident labor movement would also be a more politically effective one. “As unions have retreated, even as they have put more efforts into politics and kept up their formal ties to the Democratic Party, their sociocultural imprint has declined,” Schlozman said. “It would not surprise me that union members feel less tied into the culture of unionism that would tie them into the Democrats.”

Were Democrats to successfully promote a wave of unionization through labor law reform, unions could become more culturally relevant. Perhaps most importantly, a more powerful labor movement could nudge the Democratic Party’s issue positions into closer alignment with those of American workers. As unions have declined, power in the Democratic coalition has shifted away from organizations that represent mass working-class memberships and toward nonprofits that are accountable primarily to their wealthy, ideologically motivated donors.

Nevertheless, the Biden era should temper expectations of what organized labor can politically achieve, at least by itself. Perhaps, Biden’s historically pro-union policies would have paid more dividends if he had not also presided over inflation and the expiration of various social welfare benefits established during the Covid crisis. The president’s advanced age surely did not help matters.

But it remains the case that, under Biden, Democrats have seen their poll numbers with union voters decline at the presidential level, even as their support for organized labor’s interests increased. All the while, education polarization has continued apace. In the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, Trump wins non-college-educated white voters by 30 points, while Harris wins college-educated ones by 23. And although the Democrat wins working-class nonwhite voters overwhelmingly, her margin among them is 8 points narrower than her margin among nonwhite Americans with college degrees.

Democrats should not lessen their support for organized labor in light of these disappointing trends. But they should lower their expectations for what they’re likely to gain from delivering for individual unions with politically diverse memberships.

For now, education polarization does not look all that calamitous for the Democratic Party. The share of voters with college degrees is growing over time. In part because she is winning a historically large share of college graduates, Harris is currently competitive with Trump in enough states to win an Electoral College majority, according to Nate Silver’s polling averages. But in order to win comfortable Senate majorities and prevent figures like Donald Trump from remaining competitive in national elections, Democrats will need to improve their standing with working-class voters. Delivering for unions may be necessary for achieving that goal. But if the past four years are any guide, it will not be sufficient.

Correction, October 17, 4:00 pm: A previous version of this story misquoted Daniel Schlozman as saying, “In a big pluralistic country where we are not polarized like Austria in the old days.” He actually said “pillarized.”