According to corporate media, ex-president and notorious union-hater Donald Trump has more “working class support” than any GOP presidential candidate in a generation. They supplement this with allegedly legitimate internal “polling” from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which, according to rank-and-file Teamsters is not so accurate. The very poor so-called polling shows Trump favored by an alleged nearly 2-1 margin.
First, when pollsters talk to people they decide are workers they are coming to people Donald Trump has attempted to court with economic grievances, false patriotism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant bigotry. While the Republicans have indeed made some inroads into the working class, both union and non-union, by exploiting the issues MAGA Republicans have inundated the public with, pollsters with an agenda actually help concoct a false picture of where people stand.
One of the problems with such polling is the acceptance of incorrect assumptions about who actually the workers are. Such mistakes are even made by strong supporters of workers rights. In the Working Families Party’s new 60-page report on the Multiracial Working Class, they correctly note how on the details of race, gender, and immigration, the difference between working-class voters and the rest of the electorate is actually very small.
They unintentionally get wrong, however, the issue of who it is that constitutes the working class.
“The working class represents a gigantic share (63%) of the electorate,” they say. “Yet ideological differences within the working class are almost never explored in any systematic way,” they further state.
The working class is, in fact, a larger percentage of the population and the electorate than 63 percent. Many considered as “professionals” are in fact, workers. If one determines what class a person holds membership in by what side of his or her or their paycheck they sign (front or back) the percentage of the electorate that are workers is much higher than 63 percent. If all those are added to the group called “working class” it is actually much larger and the percentage, then, backing Trump is actually much smaller.
There are pockets of reactionary views within the working class and pockets of progressive views too, of course, just as there are among the rest of the electorate. Taken as a whole, however, there is no real evidence that the working class is more pro-Trump, certainly than the nation’s ruling class or the Wall Street crowd.
When it comes to economic concerns or class issues, the working class has significantly more progressive views on economic justice, public investment, taxing the rich, and corporate power.
Despite losing these voters by 16 points in 2020, now Trump allegedly trails by just nine, according to CNN’s “polling.” Union households in swing states account for 1-in-5 votes and are largely a politically motivated voting base.
The figures used in their assessment were aggregated, meaning an averaging of individual polls conducted by different organizations. They also compare the data of Trump’s popularity among the working class, loosely defined, on Election Day 2020 versus Harris’ polling in late September 2024.
Why did they not choose to compare the two in the same period? More concerning, why is the corporate media so concerned with displaying the working class as increasingly becoming more socially conservative, backward, and racist? Elon Musk and his ilk win the prize when it comes to all those things.
Also ignored by the corporate media is the fact that highlighting Trump’s popularity among union households can be deceptive. Membership in a union household does not always equate to being a union member.
What’s interesting is that the decline of union voters to the Democratic ticket began in 1992, when former president Bill Clinton polled at 30 points higher than the Republican before he was elected. The downward spiral started thereafter. What is to make of this?
The United Auto Workers pointed to so-called “free trade” agreements, such as NAFTA, signed by Bill Clinton, and the USMCA, and how they were considered a betrayal to working families. These policies catered to corporate greed and were backed by politicians from both sides, resulting in the working class paying the price with a loss of jobs and devastation to communities across the country.
“In the 1990s, they went after what remained of our good manufacturing jobs. Republicans and some Democrats, including a Democratic President, passed NAFTA … An estimated 90,000 factories closed over the next 25 years due to NAFTA and similar trade deals. And corporate America, with friends in both parties, won again.”
“The working class is feeling a lot of pain,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a new video. “But Donald Trump, the billionaire, the con man, is not the answer. He had his moment as President.”
The pro-union campaign promises of the Biden-Harris administration and their actions in support of workers may have negated some of the gains Republican candidates made with union voters during the Trump era, according to analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Almost all back Harris-Walz
Almost all of organized labor’s leadership, with the large exceptions being the Teamsters and Firefighters, have endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket for the 2024 elections. In Harris-Walz, unions see an opportunity to continue to make gains with the Biden Administration’s pro-labor NLRB, defend constitutional democracy against the reactionary presidential blueprint of Project 2025, and tilt the balance of forces in the U.S. away from corporate domination and towards working families.
The ex-president, Donald Trump, crossed an IATSE picket line in New York in 2004, bragged to Elon Musk about firing striking workers (which is illegal; the UAW had filed federal labor law-breaking charges against them both earlier this year), and also bragged about refusing to pay workers overtime, if at all.
Here are just a few of the anti-worker, anti-union comments that Trump made just this campaign season:
“I know a lot about overtime. I’ve hated to give overtime. I hated it,” Trump said at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania, a key swing state and home to a large number of Steelworkers. “I get other people—I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay.”
“I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump told Musk in an interview broadcast on X (formerly Twitter), explaining how he would deal with striking workers. “You walk in, you say, you want to quit? They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.”
“They’re (immigrants) taking Black jobs now and it could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people,” he said in the first presidential debate—a racist Jim Crow-esque comment signifying that our labor and jobs are racialized and a call back to when Black workers were the “last hired, first fired.”
Derrick Johnson of the NAACP replied, “There’s no such thing as a Black job or a white job.” (Michele Obama noted sarcastically in her speech at the DNC that the presidency of the United States “might just be one of those Black jobs.”)
As the AFL-CIO has repeatedly pointed out, Trump has also made campaign “promises” to specific plants and areas, only to fail to deliver on his promises. He consistently attacked workers’ rights and safety on the job by gutting agencies such as the NLRB and OSHA.
When it came to job creation, Donald Trump again failed to deliver to working families. On the other hand, the Biden Administration has passed laws such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act, which secure union labor in new developments and enforce prevailing wage laws in federal projects, among other things.
During the 2016 election, a portion of the working class facing the consequences of losing their manufacturing jobs opted to vote for Trump. The result is now that the Trump-appointed Supreme Court is rolling back long-held precedents, such as the Chevron decision, that severely weakened the NLRB, among other agencies. They are now considering a case brought by Elon Musk and his coalition of billionaires to declare the NLRB unconstitutional.
As the working class continues to struggle with rising grocery and rent prices, the working class, union and non-union, are increasingly realizing that Trump is not the right choice and Corporate America is to blame— not immigrants. They see the Harris-Walz ticket as an opportunity to cement prior gains while expanding the fight for more.
Now is the time for the working class to lead the fight for a better future for working families and for the country.
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