After Democrats lost the working class, union leaders say it’s time to ‘reconstruct the Democratic Party’

President Joe Biden proudly called himself the most pro-labor president in American history, but working-class voters moved further than ever from their traditional home in the Democratic Party in this year’s election, leading some to rethink their approach to winning working-class voters. 

While unions say their extensive organizing efforts helped Democrats largely hold the line with their members — Vice President Kamala Harris’ support among union households this year was slightly down from Biden’s in 2020, according to NBC News exit polling — the party’s erosion among working-class voters more generally is alarming.

“I don’t think the party has fully embraced, and hasn’t for decades, really, working-class people,” said Brent Booker, the general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. “We have to deconstruct and reconstruct the Democratic Party if they’re going to be the party of working people.”

Union membership has cratered over the past 50 years, so union leaders say there is only so much they can do in a world where 9 in 10 workers are not unionized and larger trends are cleaving workers from the Democratic Party.

“We can’t communicate with every nonunion laborer. We can only communicate with a portion of our members,” said Booker, who thinks Democrats could have performed better with a fierier populist message on the economy and a cooler one on cultural issues that make some of his members feel like Democrats are out-of-touch elitists. “A lot of our members own guns. A lot of our members hunt.”

Booker said that when he toured job sites this year, he heard about inflation, immigration and the demise of the Keystone Pipeline, which would have created jobs for his members but was killed for environmental concerns — all issues that played to the GOP’s favor.

Defining the working class is tricky in a postindustrial economy. But whether they are measured by income or educational attainment, President-elect Donald Trump won working-class voters overall while he made strong gains among nonwhite working-class voters like Hispanics and Asian Americans. 

As recently as 2012, non-college-educated voters were splitting their votes evenly or even slightly in favor of Democrats. This year, they broke 2-to-1 for Trump over Harris, according to NBC News exit polls. And while former President Barack Obama won 57% of people making $30,000 to $49,999 in 2012, Trump won that income bracket 53%-45% this year. 

As educated professionals who used to vote Republican recoiled from Trump, Democrats have become more affluent and educated. But that has left the party’s leaders, donors, operatives and other decision-makers more removed from the lives of low- and middle-income workers, some labor leaders say.

For instance, they say Democrats refused to acknowledge the impact of post-Covid inflation, from which higher-income professionals were more insulated, and instead tried to persuade Americans to believe abstract economic metrics over their lived experiences of painful credit card swipes at the grocery store.

“They failed to address inflation, saying that it wasn’t a big issue or that the pain that working people feel right now isn’t real,” Jimmy Williams, the president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, said on X. “The Democratic Party has continued to fail to prioritize a strong, working class message that addresses issues that really matter to workers.”

Trade unions like the Laborers and Painters tend to be whiter, more male and more conservative than service-sector unions. And the labor movement includes a vast range of opinions. But there is widespread frustration that Trump outflanked Democrats to position himself as a champion of working people, as well as dissatisfaction with Democrats not limited to white or male union members.  

“The narrative that he was able to craft was almost right out of the labor unions’ playbook in terms of focusing on the economy and jobs, bringing manufacturing jobs back, getting tough on China, making sure that working families can put more money in their pocket,” said Liz Schuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the massive labor federation that includes 60 unions that together represent 12 million people. 

Schuler said that message, from a billionaire who has stiffed workers and fell far short on promised job creation, is bogus — “He talks a good game but never delivers” — but she could not deny its power at the polls.

Trump made his pitch directly to rank-and-file members, telling them to ignore union leaders “who rip-off their membership with ridiculously high dues” — even if he sometimes made that case to nonunionized workers.

And working-class support for Democrats is hardly a new phenomenon. But some in the party say those long-term trends have reached a crisis point. 

“If you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”

Democrats have tried to win back working-class voters with policies designed to help them, especially by supporting unions. 

The theory, accepted as a truism on the left, is that good policy leads to good politics and that people will reward you with their votes if you do things to make their lives better. But the results of that strategy have been disappointing. 

Biden went all in on unions. One of his first actions as president was an $83 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of the Teamsters pension fund. He even launched his second presidential campaign from a Teamsters hall in Pittsburgh, saying: “I make no apologies. I am a union man.”

But the Teamsters could not return the favor. After surveys of their roughly 1.3 million rank-and-file members found that 60% supported Trump while only 34% supported Harris, Teamsters leaders decided not to endorse anyone. 

Most unions still backed Harris, as is typical for a Democratic presidential candidate, but the Teamsters were not the only union to break from the precedent. The International Association of Fire Fighters and the International Longshoremen’s Association, both of which backed Biden in 2020, and the United Mine Workers of America all sat out the race entirely.

That despite Biden’s embracing organized labor’s policy wish list, from pro-union appointments to the National Labor Relations Board to executive actions to strengthen unions, while potentially creating millions of union jobs through massive spending on infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductors. Biden was even the first president to walk a strike picket line.

After she took over as the party’s nominee, Harris, a longtime champion of organized labor in the Senate who also walked a picket line, vowed to uphold and expand on Biden’s pro-union policy.

But that policy was not enough to overcome larger societal forces that have led many working-class voters to doubt Democrats’ commitment to their well-being.

“If there is one single lesson of the last election, and really the last four years, it’s that delivering material benefits to workers will not help you electorally,” said Will Stancil, a progressive policy analyst with a large social media following. “Which basically annihilates the left’s entire theory of politics.”