With just a few exceptions — the Teamsters being one of them — organized labor is almost uniformly Democratic in its politics. The question of union political influence is usually just one of how much help they can be to Democrats.
In the 2016 election, the AFL-CIO was 100 percent behind Hillary Clinton in the general election. Its president, Richard Trumka, denounced Trump as a “bigot,” and had quite a few other things to say about him.
“Trump’s been very, very anti-union,” he told Soledad O’Brien’s YouTube channel Matter of Fact. “Donald Trump’s policies and his bigotry and his outrageousness are going to derail Donald Trump,” he predicted. He called Trump’s agenda “more bigoted than bold, and more condescending than comprehensive.”
And now…well, his tone is suddenly a little different. Not only has he been praising Donald Trump’s second-choice nominee for the Department of Labor, he’s also offering qualified praise for his infrastructure plan on television this morning:
“A trillion dollars is the right magnitude to be talking about,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said on Fox Business Network the day after Trump called for the spending package in his first address to Congress. “We think it’s more. The Society of American Civil Engineers think it’s more like $3 trillion.”
“He’s talking in the right ballpark,” Trumka added. “Infrastructure, it’s a three or four-time winner for all of us.”
To be sure, this is one issue where the unions in Trumka’s organization have a lot at stake from Trump’s agenda being carried out. It could just be the rare occasion where Trump and the unions come into alignment.
But it’s also worth something that Trump’s support from union voters was unusually strong for a Republican. Among voters who came from union households, he lost by only nine points percentage points, 51-42 percent, according to exit polls. That compares very favorably to other Republicans’ performances — Mitt Romney’s 18-point loss and George W. Bush’s 19-point loss in 2004 and his 22-point loss in 2000.
Just as union membership has been on the decline, the share of union household voters has shrunk as well, from 26 percent of the electorate in 2000 to just 18 percent in 2016. But as the unions continue to face pressure from new right-to-work laws and adverse court decisions, they may also be reaching the conclusion that they can’t put all of their eggs into one political basket.
The question now is just how much someone like Trumka can stand cozying up to someone like Trump, the billionaire who always seemed like such an unlikely voice for the working class.
