Voters Trust Union Candidates More—So Unions Should Run Them
A new report shows that candidates with backgrounds in labor unions can win the support of working people. The Democratic Party should take note.
Jared Abbott
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The 2024 election made one thing unmistakably clear: organized labor is no longer the unshakable pillar of the Democratic Party coalition that it once was. According to a new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics, Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, and Jacobin, titled “Can Unions Make a Difference?,” more than 40% of union members voted for Trump in 2024. The Democratic coalition has been fracturing across class lines for the last decade — a process known as class dealignment — and that divide is only growing.
The issue isn’t that workers don’t trust unions — 70% of Americans approve of them, the highest approval rating in over 50 years. It’s that they don’t trust politicians. Rather than rebranding, the solution for Democrats is clear: embrace the party’s roots in a concrete way by putting union leaders on the ballot.
At a time when trust in all kinds of institutions — political, business, economic — is collapsing, labor unions stand out with a singular kind of public approval that could be leveraged into real electoral influence. To the American people, unions are a counteragent to the political machine — an institution, yes, but one of the few that people can actually get behind. Despite this, most unions vastly underuse their electoral position, opting to simply donate to incumbents or candidates whose victories look inevitable.
The study found that candidates with union backgrounds use 159% more pro-worker language and 66% more progressive economic language, prioritizing a pro-worker, economic populist agenda. Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), a former industrial electrician, has experience catching language in bills that could hurt workers’ needs:
I’m reading through the bills that are coming up this week on the plane, like I do every week…and as I’m going through ’em, I see something that jumps out at me. It talks about being able to waive requirements on certain job classifications…[So I] called the office. ‘Would you look this up? Something doesn’t seem right to me…’ I do this probably a dozen times a year. Things that jump out at me; how does it affect the collective bargaining agreement? Does it impact Davis – Bacon [prevailing wage law], your registered apprenticeships? That’s second nature to me because of where I grew up and what I used to do. Well, lo and behold, everybody’s union started looking at it and saying, ‘Wait a minute.’
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), who comes from a working-class background in organized labor, explained that he frequently needs to explain the labor movement in its most rudimentary, foundational terms to his millionaire colleagues, highlighting a remark from one such fellow member of Congress:
And the comment they made in a closed-door meeting was about ‘the average person’ with ‘just’ $200,000 in retirement savings…So I did a little research, and that’s about one out of eight people in the country.
Most congresspeople are blind to the realities of class disparity, and the American people know it. A union tradesperson, however, isn’t playing working-class politics — they’ve lived it. Their livelihood depends on it.
By not backing their own, American unions are leaving wins on the table. When PAC money from labor overwhelmingly flows to incumbents, unions become another conservative institution seeking access instead of using power to challenge the status quo and benefit members. What’s more, unions currently don’t prioritize working-class candidates or pro-worker rhetoric. The report found that while unions care about a candidate’s union background, they’re not as focused on whether candidates come from the working class or run on a pro-worker platform.
Labor PACs do give more money to working-class and pro-union candidates in raw numbers, but those instances only occur in districts with high union involvement, where unions are already spending more. In other words, the candidates aren’t motivating the spending — the districts are. Ultimately, labor PACs are rewarding institutional ties over platform substance.
As Andrew Waxman of the national AFL-CIO puts it, “Unions, like most donors, tend to back candidates that can raise their own money.” By being reactive instead of proactive, labor has allowed the Democratic Party to create a Congress full of the kinds of millionaires Rep. Pocan describes.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The New Jersey AFL-CIO has accumulated over 1,300 electoral wins at a 76% success rate over 20 years, passing and strengthening worker-focused legislation like paid family leave, card-check laws, and prevailing wage. Of the 26 trainees in the first two years of Alaska’s new Allman Labor Candidate School, eight have been elected. Organized labor can build its own pipeline of candidates and win. As former Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) asks: Unions spend “[millions] on campaigns. What if they put 2% into getting union members elected?”
Working people who see themselves on the ballot will turn out. But overwhelmingly, they haven’t. President Donald Trump has long espoused a faux economic populism. The cure to the class dealignment we face is real economic populism that comes from putting working people in office.
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