In a stark, anguished get-out-the-vote mass email message sent to union members and allies Sunday, the AFL-CIO labor federation revealed how badly it thought the turnout was going to go on Election Day.
Under the subject line “Sweet dreams aren’t made of this,” AFL-CIO Deputy Director of Campaigns Geri Prado said she had an “awful, awful dream” in which the Republicans won big.
“In my dream, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was leading a Congress that was passing bills making it easier to ship our jobs overseas, to end Social Security and Medicare as we know it, and to give corporations and CEOs even more tax breaks,” Prado said in the message. “But do you know what really scared the stuffings out of me? All those anti-worker candidates won because working families stayed home on Election Day. They didn’t vote.”
She urged recipients to call friends and family and remind them to get to the polls Tuesday to “prevent my scary dream from becoming a real-life nightmare.”
Rhetoric usually gets particularly heated and hyperbolic on the eve of an election as political players take that last opportunity to try to boost their numbers, so the union coalition’s Sunday appeal should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, this was an unusually stark message from an organization that has long been the backbone of the Democratic Party’s Election Day turnout machine.
By contrast in a Nov. 2, 2012, announcement just prior to Election Day, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka confidently announced: “By talking one-on-one with working class voters, we’ve been able to cut through the noise of endless TV ads bought by big corporate interests and discuss core economic issues like protecting Medicare, ending tax cuts for the rich and creating good jobs.”
The AFL-CIO is showing no such confidence this year and instead announcing that too many people are staying home. That’s a telling difference.
