Harris Lost the Very Voters She Needed the Most
Harris held onto union households, but by only a 10-point margin (54-44) compared to Biden’s 16-point margin (56-40). If Harris hadn’t been so diffident about labor issues in her campaign, she might have done better. Harris was also hurt when three major unions—the Teamsters, the International Association of Firefighters, and the International Longshoremen’s Association—declined to endorse her (I think out of cowardice). Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the AFL-CIO who now runs a voter project called In Union, noted that Harris actually bested Biden with union households in Pennsylvania, where it really mattered. In 2020 Biden lost Pennsylvania’s union households, 49-50, whereas in 2024 Harris won them, 54-45. Unfortunately, that gain was not decisive, because union workers are only about 13 percent of all workers in Pennsylvania.
If Democrats are going to reconnect with working-class voters, reviving organized labor remains the best way to do so. That will prove difficult under an administration that will almost certainly be as hostile to labor as Trump’s first one was. Adding insult to injury, the substantial economic benefits of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and CHIPS and Science Act—well-documented by Nicholas Lemann in last week’s New Yorker—will start to be felt in the next four years, allowing Trump to take credit for them. Trump promised to repeal the IRA, but with most of the money flowing to Republican districts, that isn’t likely to happen.
Second-best to reviving labor unions, which I grant you is a tall order, is to support the many organizations, most of them state-based, that are working at the ground level to re-connect working-class people to the Democratic Party and to policies from which working people benefit—policies that Republicans are working to dismantle. Here’s a sampling:
