The shift toward populism across the American electorate has both parties chasing working-class voters as if they were a prize swing state in a presidential election. That competition is healthy. Meaningful contrasts still matter.
What’s not good is the practice, unchanged for decades, that presents big labor bosses as though they spoke for the interests of America’s working men and women. The new reality is that while union leaders are almost uniformly Democrats, union households are politically mixed. National 2024 exit polls found Kamala Harris winning those households 53 percent to 45 percent. That’s an eight-point Democratic edge, but only half of former President Joe Biden’s 16-point margin four years earlier.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, won white union-household voters without a college degree, and by a wide margin. Pew has found that union members lean 60–40 Democrat. That’s probably expected, given the only place where union membership is growing is in the public sector.
Democrats are increasingly the party of government, literally and figuratively, but union voters are not a monolith. What’s puzzling is the way the political machines of both parties still behave as though they were.
Akash Chougule, the president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, puts the mismatch bluntly: roughly 45 percent of union households voted Republican in 2024, while about 87 percent of union political spending benefited Democrats.
The first figure tracks the Edison/CNN household exit poll. The second is consistent with OpenSecrets and FEC patterns: building-trades contributions in the 2024 cycle ran about 88 percent Democratic; large public-sector PACs often exceed 95 percent. Individual industrial unions run even more lopsided. The American Accountability Foundation’s Tom Jones told Congress that BLET’s PAC sent 98.97 percent of its party-committee dollars to Democrats — $506,581 to $5,250 — “in 2024, after it was obvious to everyone that rail workers were voting for President Trump.” SMART-TD’s pattern was similar. “A political program that gives 97, 98, or 99 cents of every dollar to one party is not a labor program,” Jones said. “It is a party operation on union letterhead.”
Jones’s larger claim is that the treasuries no longer function mainly as bargaining tools. “These industrial unions now function, for practical purposes, as a financial subsidiary of the Democratic Party, even as their own members have moved decisively in the other direction.” He pointed to LM-2 filings showing millions for casinos, resorts, sports sponsorships, and executive pay — “that does nothing to improve a single member’s wages, hours, or working conditions.” SMART-TD, he noted, gave $300,000 to the Blue Green Alliance and funded Jobs With Justice and Working Partnerships USA. “The men and women on the railroads and the factory floors do not know that $3.9 million of their union’s treasury went to Caesars, or that their PAC’s largest check went to EMILY’s List, because their leadership has no interest in telling them.”
Republicans are not innocent of the proxy problem. As they chase union voters, they wine and dine union bosses, confusing their priorities and signing onto favored mandates even when they collide with a deregulatory, affordability or innovation agenda. On June 9 of this year, the Faster Labor Contracts Act passed the House 230–193 by discharge petition, carried by 20 Republican votes. It forces employers to the table within 10 days of a union’s request and, after a short clock of talks and mediation, lets a three-member panel impose a binding two-year contract that neither the workers nor the employer ever voted on.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien called it “one of the most consequential labor bills to come before Congress in generations.” Months earlier, the Protect America’s Workforce Act passed on a similar 20-Republican discharge path. The Railway Safety Act was folded into surface-transportation reauthorization. “Each was sold as bipartisan and pro-worker,” Jones testified. “Each transferred power and money to the same leadership whose spending I have just described.”
Rail is the cleanest illustration. Lawmakers in both parties invoke rail workers when they want moral cover. Some of what those workers want — safe staffing, predictable schedules, respect on the job — belongs at the bargaining table or in a safety case with evidence. Statutory mandates lock in leadership’s wish list, converting workplace disputes into political issues. Moreover, Jones’s data shows the people who cut the PAC checks don’t necessarily speak for those who have dues taken out of their paychecks.
“Take even the number most favorable to union leadership,” Jones says, “and four in ten of their members voted for President Trump. Yet these unions directed 97, 98, and 99 percent of their political dollars against those members’ chosen candidate.”
“For decades the conservative instinct has been to treat the union boss as the gatekeeper to the union member: earn the endorsement, win the members,” Jones said. “The gate no longer works. The members have already moved.”
With both parties claiming to represent the working class, there’s a simple test to see which does. Stop treating the lobbyist as the worker. Ask the people who pay the dues whether the political program bought with those dues matches their priorities — manufacturing, energy, borders, take-home pay — or only the priorities of the people who spend the money in Las Vegas and at the Democratic Governors Association. Hearings are how they find out. Representation starts by standing with members, not negotiating with the names on the letterhead.
A veteran journalist formerly on staff at U.S. News & World Report, UPI, and other outlets, Peter Roff regularly produces commentary on current political and public policy matters for domestic and international outlets. You can reach him at RoffColumns AT GMAIL.com and follow him on social media @TheRoffDraft.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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