Before the election, even the mainstream media was abuzz with stories about union members deserting Kamala Harris in droves.
“Can Harris Stop Blue-Collar Workers from Defecting to Donald Trump?” a New Yorker magazine headline asked ominously.
The answer was yes.
“The union vote has always been the bedrock of the Democratic Party, and obviously they weren’t swayed in the way that people expected to vote for Donald Trump,” said Bill Londrigan, past president of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO. “It’s a good sign that union members are still a more reliable voting bloc and really do care about this country.”
Wrote Politico’s Nick Niedzwiadek: “Despite persistent fears that labor might break for former President Donald Trump, exit polling showed Vice President Kamala Harris winning voters in union households 55 to 43 percent, roughly on par with President Joe Biden’s performance in 2020,” (A separate survey from NBC News had Harris up 10 points among union voters.)”
He added, “In fact, union voters were one of the few groups that did not appreciably shift toward Trump and Republicans in what is shaping up to be one of the party’s strongest presidential election cycles in recent memory,” [Italics mine].
Added Londrigan: “Union members have always been more informed about the issues and the candidates than the average voter, and as a result they are more likely to vote for candidates that support working people, and this is another instance where that happened.”
Niedzwiadek quoted Steve Smith, the AFL-CIO’s deputy director for public affairs: “There were much bigger issues afoot for Democrats in this election, but if you’re looking for bright spots, labor was one of them.”
So it turned out that most union families are clued in on the fact that Trump was one of worst-ever president for guys like me who pack union cards. Click here, here, here, and here.
While Trump trashed union leaders like UAW President Shawn Fain who refused to knuckle under to him, he bragged that union members working on jobsites were with him. He probably dismissed the AFL-CIO Executive Council’s unanimous Harris endorsement as meaningless because it came from “union bosses.”
The facts proved him wrong, as they almost always do about anything he claims.
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