Tony Diver
US Editor
19 September 2024 11:00am
Donald Trump’s electoral storm in 2016 was built on his ability to win over blue collar workers.
The former president constructed a coalition of establishment Republicans and working class Americans which – unexpectedly – triumphed over Hillary Clinton and rocked the core of the Democratic base.
The Teamsters’ decision not to back a candidate in this election, announced on Wednesday, is a sign he could be on track to repeat the trick this year.
The move is a significant blow for Kamala Harris, after she inherited a campaign from Joe Biden that was built around his support for union labour.
Internal polling released by the group shows that 60 per cent of its members support Trump, while only 34 per cent say they will be voting for Ms Harris.
The union’s president, Sean O’Brien, made headlines in July when he attended the Republican National Convention, giving a cautious welcome to Trump’s campaign and vowing to put the interests of his members first. He did not appear at the Democratic convention in Chicago a month later.
The Teamsters are the fifth-largest union in the US, with more than 1.4 million members formed of truck drivers, warehouse workers and employees in a variety of other jobs that usually lean Democrat.
The decision not to endorse a candidate is unheard of in modern political history. This race is the first for more than three decades where it has not endorsed a candidate. The last time it chose a Republican was in 1988, when George HW Bush triumphed by a country mile in the electoral college.
This time, blue collar workers are set to decide the result of the election, with Pennsylvania emerging as the most significant swing state coveted by both candidates. The latest polls there show Ms Harris is ahead there – but only narrowly.
Unlike Mr Biden, Ms Harris is not a natural creature of the industrial midwest. She has no “Scranton Joe” origin story and unlike her former running mate, she does not generally refer to unions every time she talks about the importance of building up America’s middle class.
Her campaign also has policy challenges with blue collar workers. Trump has been more aggressive in his pledges to protect domestic manufacturing from cheap Chinese imports, and he has made a specific pledge to ban tax on overtime.
He has vowed to row back Mr Biden’s acceleration of electric vehicle adoption, and he wants to increase domestic energy production from fossil fuels. Those promises are popular among the voters that could hand him the keys to the White House in November.
On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign released a statement welcoming the Teamsters’ decision not to endorse a candidate, and celebrating their win in the union’s internal polling.
His jubilation at a lack of explicit support might seem unusual – if not for the expectation that the group would choose a Democrat over him again this year after doing so in 2016 and 2020.
But he is right that a lack of endorsement of Ms Harris in November is a tacit backing of his campaign. If he has any hope of repeating the magic of his 2016 campaign again this year, the union’s lukewarm support is a good place to start.
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