Teamsters Union members picket at the Marathon Petroleum Detroit refinery in Detroit, Mich., on Sept. 4. The Teamsters declined to endorse a candidate for president this year, saying union membership is too divided to take such a stand.Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
Earlier this month, Bernie Sanders travelled to the sprawling industrial outskirts of Detroit to meet with striking workers at a Marathon Petroleum refinery. His appearance was more than a show of solidarity from a lifelong progressive. In the final months of the Democratic effort to maintain control of the White House, the party has dispatched the Vermont senator across the country to address groups of voters, unions key among them.
In Detroit, Mr. Sanders stood on the picket line flanked by people in campaign clothing. One was dressed in a “Teamsters Against Trump” top. Michigan Teamsters president Kevin Moore wore a Harris-Walz shirt. It was Mr. Sanders and Vice-President Kamala Harris who helped protect Teamsters pensions from deep cuts in 2021, Mr. Moore told those gathered outside the sprawling refinery.
Mr. Sanders expressed solidarity. “We are sick and tired of the people on top making out like bandits while working people are struggling,” he said.
“Proud to stand with you,” he added.
But it’s not clear how many Teamsters, the fourth-largest union in the U.S., will stand with Democrats this year.
“I’m going for Trump. One hundred per cent,” Addison Piglia, one of the striking refinery workers, said on a recent night on the picket line. Humanity “hit the jackpot when we discovered oil,” he said, and Mr. Trump has promised more fossil fuel production. Mr. Piglia, an operator in the refinery’s coker unit, has a dim view of Ms. Harris.
“I could see the way of our nation going down the drain if she gets in,” he said.
Nationally, the Teamsters have declined to endorse a candidate for president, saying union membership is too divided to take such a stand. The International Association of Fire Fighters similarly declined a national endorsement.
Organized labour has historically provided a bedrock of Democratic support, with roughly 60 per cent of union households voting for the party’s candidate in most of the elections over the past century in which such data was gathered.
The exceptions, however, have come at moments of Republican strength. In 1972, a majority of union families cast ballots for Richard Nixon. Nearly half of such homes voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. And in 2016, a comparably low union vote for Hillary Clinton was part of the weakness that delivered that election to Donald Trump.
This year again, organized labour has commanded the attention of both parties. Unionized workers make up an above-average share of voters in four of the seven swing states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan. Local Teamster groups in each of those states have broken with the national organization to endorse Ms. Harris.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, one of the most influential labour leaders in the country, has also campaigned for Ms. Harris, calling her a fighter for the working class while deriding Mr. Trump as a “scab.” In office, Mr. Trump “basically gutted all the workplace safety laws,” said Brian Rothenberg, a former UAW spokesman.
But the former president has leavened his economic plan with appeals to workers, including promises to get rid of taxes on overtime work, end mandates for electric car sales and impose tariffs on foreign-made goods to favour American manufacturing.
“We’re going to put American workers first, America’s jobs first, American cars first, American factories first,” he said in Detroit last week.
Mr. Trump’s rise to prominence has coincided with a much broader remaking of the American electorate, what Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who specializes in analyzing voting statistics, calls a “slow-moving realignment” that Mr. Trump has helped to accelerate.
“It used to be that lower-education whites were part of the Democratic coalition. And now they’re more likely to be in the Republican coalition,” Prof. McDonald said.
Mr. Trump won in 2016 by securing a large share of votes among voting men. Democrats, meanwhile, have outperformed with better-educated voters.
At the same time, unions themselves have changed. White men once dominated organized labour. Today, women make up nearly half of U.S. union members.
In politics, however, unions no longer hold the same sway, said Joel Benenson, a Democratic strategist who played pivotal roles in the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Mr. Obama, in particular, proved the power of grassroots organizing, Mr. Benenson said.
“Unions used to be the way you mobilized people, and they were very strong entities for doing so,” he said. “But the world changed.”
More conservative forces, such as the business community, have at the same time eclipsed union spending, said Marick Masters, a professor emeritus at Michigan’s Wayne State University who has specialized in union studies.
“You can put six wealthy people from Silicon Valley together that can raise as much money for a candidate as all organized labour can in one election cycle,” Mr. Masters said.
What it means is that “organized labour is increasingly unimportant in politics,” he added.
Still, in states whose presidential vote may hang on the priorities of a few thousand voters, the political decisions made by individual workers, such as the striking Teamsters in Detroit, may prove consequential.
For relief operator Michael Dunaway, inflation is top of mind. “I make six figures a year, and I can barely scrape by,” he said. Refinery lab technician Madeleine Newman has listened to Mr. Trump’s promises for workers, and decided that “the Republican side is definitely becoming more pro-union.” Though she has yet to decide how she will vote, “the industry we work in, we’re not going to get much support from the Democrats,” she said.
Her colleague Gligor Karapandov said the Democrats seem like the “lesser evil” among two parties that he sees as both being too beholden to corporate interests.
For others, issues far from the picket line carry the greatest importance. Luciana Riachi, another lab technician, has been a committed Democrat. But she is Lebanese, and the spiral of conflict in the Middle East has broken her party loyalty. Seeing Democratic figures such as Mr. Sanders show an interest in striking workers has done little to alleviate those concerns.
“They come out here, take the picture, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, vote for us,’ ” she said. “But what have you done?”