It was one of the most heated moments of the Democratic National Convention. last monday night, Shawn Fainthe president of the United Auto union, strode to the stage at the United Center, took off his blazer and revealed a red t-shirt that read “Trump is a scab.”
The crowd, filled with loyalists who also wore matching shirts, roared with approval and began chanting “Trump scab.” Fain, an electrician who works in an Indiana auto parts factory, is a throwback to another archetype of the bare-knuckle labor leader. He praised the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris as a “fighter for the working class” and a stab Trump as a “lapdog for the billionaire class.”
But while Fain evokes combative labor bosses from an earlier era, behind that vintage style there is a state-of-the-art, tech-savvy campaign machine poised to capitalize on the moment. Before long, the digital foot soldiers of the Harris-Waltz team, along with the UAW, had posted Fain’s video on social media, getting millions of views, thousands of bright red shirts had been sold, and the word “scab” ” was trending online.
The choreographic theater reflects the methodical planning and preparation by the Harris-Walz campaign to find every opportunity to amplify the labor message and, crucially, to aggressively burnish its own pro-union credentials with beloved labor leaders. And with good reason – the union vote might determine in 2024.
Knowing that Donald Trump’s strong performance with union households in battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin may have helped Hillary Clinton win the election in 2016, the Harris campaign knew that blue-collar voters could emerge as the campaign season’s version of the ball mom. – suburbs of the city. – demographics are pivotal to victory.
“There are 2.7 million union members in a country at war,” wrote Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Harris-Walz’s campaign manager, in an Aug. 8 memo shared with CBS News. “This means that when about 45,000 votes in important countries decided the elections four years ago.”
Last week, Democratic Party convention planners ignored the details of the labor draw. Record number – 20% – Democratic delegates are union members; all members of the delegation from the 50 states and territories stay in union hotels; almost all physical work at the convention attracted the attention of union workers, from building sets to electrical work, as well as makeup for speakers and performers. And the raucous call to unionism is strategically placed in many of the celebratory roll calls.
The Harris campaign sees tight collaboration with labor as a force multiplier.
“We’re in a fragmented media environment and it’s very difficult to reach undecided voters,” said one campaign official. “Unity is the ultimate validator: it can cut through the noise and misinformation and provide the facts about our record vs. Trump.”
Once a staple of the Democratic Party, union membership has fractured in the Trump era — with the former Republican president proving effective at drawing traditional Democratic voters across the aisle. Backstage in the convention hall, it’s clear the Harris campaign is employing old-school, hardball tactics to try to counter their gains.
When another union leader, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, addressed the Republican convention in Milwaukee late last month, Democrats took notice. O’Brien praised Trump as a “tough SOB” and said he “doesn’t care about being criticized” for being the first Teamsters leader to speak at a Republican convention in its 121-year history.
But two weeks later, Trump yukking with Elon Musk in the conversation in X about firing workers. The Republican nominee praised Musk as “the biggest cutter,” saying “look what you’re doing, you’re walking around, you’re saying ‘you want to stop?’ I won’t name the company, but they went on strike, and you: ‘You’ve lost everything!'”
O’Brien was quick to engage in damage control, issuing a statement to Politico calling Trump’s remarks “economic terrorism.” But the Harris campaign and its labor allies saw an opportunity for payback. The next day, Fain filed a UAW grievance to Trump and Musk with the National Labor Relations Board charging him with unfair labor practices. The Harris campaign was thrilled and invited Fain to hit the airwaves to talk about the move, according to sources close to Fain.
O’Brien scrambled for an opportunity to get back into the Democrats’ good graces. He asked to speak at the convention, but the Harris campaign talked him out of it, according to labor sources. Campaign officials did not respond to requests for comment. Then, in a move seen to undermine O’Brien, the Harris campaign invited several rank-and-file Teamsters members to attend the convention party without a leader.
One labor source who asked not to be identified to speak freely about the episode called it a “snub.” Others suggest it sends a gentle message that there may be consequences for supporting Trump.
“He didn’t throw the ball over his head, but he probably went in a little bit to make him step back from the plate,” said Eddie Vale, a political and labor strategist who has represented unions including the AFL-CIO. A Harris campaign source said only that O’Brien won’t be able to handle the convention, because he isn’t ready to endorse the Democratic ticket.
However, as the convention closed, officials with the Harris campaign said it opened the door to a rapprochement with Teamsters leaders. In what one labor source called a “goodwill signal,” Harris accepted an invitation to meet with the union’s executive board, which will include O’Brien.
“They both want to know if they’re still talking,” the source said.
Harris faces a tougher challenge in gaining union support than his predecessors. President Biden’s close relationship with unions was formed after years of developing his image as “Scranton Joe,” a politician whose middle-class roots helped him understand the plight and aspirations of workers. But Harris, a more cosmopolitan personality from California’s Bay Area, had to work harder to define himself as a natural ally of the working class.
In 2020, Mr. Biden won 57% of the union vote in key rust belt states, compared to Trump’s 40%. Harris, by most accounts, needs to do at least as much as Biden to win this election.
Trump has also been wooing the labor force. In January, he participated in the Teamsters Rank-and-File Presidential Roundtable (Mr. Biden visited Teamsters headquarters a few weeks later) and praised the union for the many great projects it had built with Teamsters labor. And in some transactional politics, he promised to give union leaders “a seat at the table” if they endorsed him in the election.
The Harris team is being strategic about workforce dating. At the convention last week, speakers seemed to take every opportunity to point out that Harris had worked at McDonald’s when he was in college, and the nomination itself was also brought up during his acceptance speech. Harris said sentimentally, but tactfully, about the modest East Bay neighborhood he grew up in, calling it “a good class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses and construction workers.”
And almost immediately Harris has become considered a candidate Last month, his campaign sent him on a tour of the battleground state where he met with rank-and-file union members, including UAW workers in Detroit. The campaign emphasized Harris’ pro-union record, pointing out that he walked the picket line with union strikers in 2019 when he was first president and as vice president, he broke a tie in the Senate that allowed Butch Lewis to pass. The law, which restored the pensions of more than a million workers.
Then there was Harris’ choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is her running mate. His plain-spoken Midwestern style, football-coach persona and flannel-shirt-wearing appeal to lunchtime voters. A Harris campaign official said it was no coincidence that Walz’s first solo campaign trip was to a general meeting of members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees at an international convention in Los Angeles. And not for nothing, Walz, a former high school teacher, is a member of the card-carrying union — the American Federation of Teachers.
In the end, the worker’s vote is likely to follow the worker’s candidate who feels that he can best deal with the economy of the working class. Harris will almost certainly win the labor vote, but what will matter most is Trump’s ability to cut his edge with economic appeals to working-class voters, likely on immigration and trade.
Robert Forrant, a historian of the American labor movement, said the Harris campaign knew this, and made economic concerns part of its message.
“They’ve started talking about the importance of inflation, and you can’t pretend it’s not.” But he says the Harris campaign still needs to do more, like admitting that working people have to hold down multiple jobs to make it work, a fact that has third-order effects, including destroying the family structure. “You have to thread the needle when appealing for a union vote,” Forrant said.
