Affluent, woke Democrats have spent years denigrating ordinary working Americans who want sensible things such as peace, prosperity and safe communities.
Working Americans have noticed, of course — and it could cost President Joe Biden his job.
According to Axios, Democrats from presumptive swing states have begun to fret over evidence of eroding support for the president among key constituencies, including a March Quinnipiac poll from Michigan that showed Biden down 64 percent with voters in union households compared with where he stood in ABC News exit polling during the 2020 presidential election.
“We need to be concerned,” Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan said.
Kildee, of course, regards the Democrats as the pro-union party. But, he said, voters might not recognize that.
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“We can’t just assume people are going to figure it out for themselves. We’ve got to tell the story,” the congressman said.
Meanwhile, the powerful Teamsters Union, a longtime Democratic Party stalwart, has drifted toward the GOP.
Earlier this year, for instance, the Teamsters made their first donation to the Republican National Committee since 2004. The union also donated to Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has met with former President Donald Trump, the soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee. And O’Brien has requested to speak at the Republican National Convention next month.
Can Trump defeat Biden among union voters?
Biden continues to enjoy support from union leadership, including an endorsement from the United Auto Workers.
That cozy relationship with union leaders, however, belies the president’s mounting estrangement from actual workers.
“Democrats have to recognize that this affiliation [with union leadership] … is not translating into electoral support,” Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota said.
Phillips has spent nearly a year sounding the alarm about Biden’s electoral prospects. The Minnesota congressman took that alarm so seriously, in fact, that he posed a primary challenge to the president.
He remains a Democrat, of course, so one can hardly rely on his judgment. Phillips does, however, deserve credit for prescience.
For instance, an Emerson College Polling/The Hill series of June polls conducted in presumptive swing states showed Trump holding narrow leads of 1 to 4 percentage points in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
But the real news was that the poll found Trump and Biden tied in Phillips’ Minnesota. Earlier this year, major pollsters did not even bother counting Minnesota as a swing state, for no GOP candidate has won that state’s electoral votes since President Richard Nixon in 1972.
For all the good news this story contains, it did raise two interesting and potentially troublesome questions.
First, according to a February NBC News poll, union voters nationwide still preferred Biden by 9 points over Trump.
As a resident of western Pennsylvania, I had to wonder who among union voters supported Biden. This region, long a steel-producing Democratic stronghold, has turned decisively in Trump’s direction. Who could still support the establishment president?
Well, it depends on what one means by “union.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2023, the rate of union membership among public-sector workers (32.5 percent) dwarfed that of private-sector workers (6 percent). Overall, only 10 percent of U.S. wage and salary workers belonged to unions.
Furthermore, of the 14.4 million unionized workers nationwide, a gargantuan 7 million belonged to public-sector unions. That means teachers and government employees.
In other words, these are not your grandfather’s unions.
Second, if unions have begun to jump ship, then who remains? After all, many Hispanics and young black voters have abandoned the Biden coalition.
Can Democrats really win by becoming the party of affluent globalists, single women and illegal immigrants?
Moreover, why do the polls remain as close as they are?
