Shrinking union base a warning for Democrats

Lack of enthusiasm may have doomed Clinton in big industrial states like Ohio.

One of the more stunning developments in what was already the surprising victory of Republican Donald Trump in the presidential election was the way the industrial Midwest fell like dominoes for him.

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First, Ohio. Then Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Michigan, one week after the election, still hadn’t been called, but election officials said Trump looked poised to win that state as well.

All four were strongholds for President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, in large part because of strong union support. Indiana went for Obama in 2008, flipped to the Republican column in 2012, and then made a more definitive statement on Nov. 8, when Hillary Clinton won just four counties and received less than 38 percent of the vote.

Indiana has long been considered a red state, but the others have either been reliably blue or a swing state going back many election cycles. So what happened this year?

“The Democratic Party has lost its footing among working people and allowed the Republican Party to become the party of the working class,” said Robert Bruno, director of the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “And that’s an astonishing thing to have to admit.”

Bruno and other labor experts say the election results reflect an increasingly fraught relationship between rank-and-file union members and Democrats. While union leadership has stuck solidly with Democratic candidates, the rank and file feels torn: They do not feel that eight years of a Democratic presidency fixed what they had hoped it would fix.

“There was a lot of talk about how the economy has recovered and how the jobs were better and the economy had turned around,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “If you’re a worker today, there are jobs out there, but to support your family you have to work two of those jobs.”

Median income is up, unemployment is down and there are more auto jobs than there were eight years ago. But dig into the numbers and, said Bruno, “what you end up seeing is a vast amount of jobs are not middle class jobs.

“The overwhelming percentage of the gains have gone to, if not the top one (percent), the top 20 percent of income….Economic decline has been the most prominent characteristic of the lives of working class workers for decades now.”

Trump is the product of the evolution of the economy and the failure of public policy to lessen the pain felt by many working families, Bruno said.

“One candidate looked like more of the same and the other candidate had the rhetoric that spoke to that pain,” he said. “They gambled on the unknown.”

Union split

Clinton secured the endorsement of labor union after labor union — the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Autoworkers, the United Steelworkers and the Teamsters — but there was a split within the ranks, according to Bruno.

This showed up in the Democratic primaries when many in the rank-and-file were drawn to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his message of economic inequality, he said. Trump continued that same message during the general election.

Union leadership tends to back the candidate thought to have the best chance of winning, which is typically the centrist. But Bruno says there wasn’t the same enthusiasm for Clinton among the rank-and-file, which tamped down turnout on Election Day and even sent some of those votes to Trump.

Exit polls on Nov. 8 showed a drop in Democratic support among voters in union households over four years ago. In 2012, Barack Obama got about 58 percent of that vote compared to 40 percent for Republican Mitt Romney.

This year, CNN’s exit poll showed Clinton with 51 percent of the vote from those in union households compared to 43 percent for Trump. In other words, she still won the union vote, but Trump made a dent.

In Ohio it was more than a head-on collision. Trump, according to exit polls, won 49 percent of the union vote compared to 44 percent for Clinton.

To put that into perspective, Obama received 60 percent of Ohio’s union vote in 2012 while Romney received 37 percent.

Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga said Trump “was speaking a language that hit on an emotional level, even though Donald Trump has not led his life or has a history or record of helping working people.”

“We could tell that voters were unsure of Donald Trump,” he said. “But we could also sense they felt like a change election was what was being desired.”

Shrinking base

Perhaps the most troubling sign for unions — and maybe Democrats too — is the shrinking union base. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 17.7 million Americans belonged to unions in 1983. By 2015, that number had fallen to 14.8 million.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, acknowledged that Trump’s message was “appealing” to many union members.

“Hillary reminded them of NAFTA,” he said, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement that was negotiated by her husband and is despised in many union households. “They didn’t trust Hillary, in the end, to give us something different. It was a change election in that way.”

But Brown predicts the working-class infatuation with Trump will end quickly, particularly if Democrats get behind policies that call for a higher minimum wage, more generous family leave time and new overtime rules. “We’ve got to fight for them,” he said of the working class. “And if Donald Trump does too, more power to him.”

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