Eight years ago, Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was enthusiastically backed by Big Labor bosses, but ended up carrying the union household vote nationwide by a historically low eight percentage points, well under half of President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 winning margins with this segment of the electorate.
If Clinton had done as well with the union rank-and-file as many earlier Democrat nominees, she surely would have won the presidency.
That is why a September survey of Teamster rank-and-file members, conducted by the polling firm Lake Research Partners for the Teamster hierarchy, ought to have the Harris-Walz ticket deeply concerned.
The poll shows Harris-Walz losing the rank-and-file Teamster vote to Trump-Vance, 58% to 31%. Of course, overwhelmingly blue-collar Teamster members are far more apt to back Donald Trump than, say, unionized K-12 school or university employees. But this poll and a Fox News poll conducted around the same time both indicate the Harris-Walz ticket is poised to fare even worse with union households of all kinds than Clinton-Kaine did in 2016. CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten reported a similar deficit just days ago.
There is a real possibility that a majority of union household members who vote will thumb their noses at Big Labor bosses and cast their ballots against Harris-Walz.
The undoubtedly anemic union rank-and-file support for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz is a serious problem for their campaign, admit veteran Big Labor journalistic partisans like Steven Greenhouse and Tim Noah.
Greenhouse and Noah strongly support current federal policies that authorize the termination of millions of private-sector American employees from their jobs if they cease forking over dues or fees to the union that wields monopoly-bargaining power over their terms and conditions of employment. And they oppose the 26 state Right to Work laws now on the books, which protect employees in those states from being fired for refusal to bankroll an unwanted union.
Moreover, Greenhouse and Noah believe union members should support Harris and Walz specifically because they have gone on record in support of union bosses’ top federal legislative objective, the so-called “PRO” Act. This omnibus legislation expands Big Labor’s power over the individual worker in many ways, but its most important provision would effectively eliminate all current state Right to Work laws and bar all states from protecting private-sector employees’ Right to Work in the future.
If a majority or a near-majority of union members don’t support Harris-Walz, it must be because they don’t know the Democrat ticket supports the “PRO” Act, insist Greenhouse and Noah. Especially since Trump recently signaled he is open, if returned to the White House, to signing legislation that would protect the individual employee’s freedom not to bankroll a union nationwide!
The awful possibility Greenhouse and Noah are unwilling to contemplate is that most rank-and-file union members actually share Trump’s “love” for Right to Work protections and oppose Harris’s scheme to “override” all state Right to Work statutes and constitutional provisions. Unfortunately for Greenhouse and Noah, that happens to be truth.
Late this August, as Labor Day weekend approached, the National Right to Work Committee released the results of a new nationwide poll of registered voters on the important campaign issue of compulsory unionism.
Pollster RMG Research, often referred to as Rasmussen, asked a random sampling of 1,000 registered voters whether they “agree or disagree” with the statement that workers “should never be forced to join a union or pay dues to a union as a condition of employment.” A lopsided majority of 82% of registered voters agree with this statement.
This poll shows there is very little daylight between unionized employees and union-free employees on the Right to Work issue. According to RMG Research, 79% of actively employed registered voters who currently belong to a union voiced their opposition to compulsory unionism. Among employees who don’t belong to a union at this time, there was 84% opposition to compulsory unionism.
The reality is that raising employees’ awareness of the fact that Harris is eager to destroy their Right to Work, whereas Trump supports it, would hurt, not help, her presidential bid. That is why the multi-billion-dollar union electioneering and lobbying machine is doing everything in its power this fall to divert employees’ and other voters’ attention away from the issue of freedom in the workplace.
Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Committee.
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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