Donald Trump: “I have tremendous support within unions … every poll shows it.”
Unions: Not so damn fast.
The AFL-CIO has released a data point from its internal polling, pushing back on Trump’s assertion of major support from union members—an assertion frequently repeated in media accounts of his appeal to white working-class voters. According to a memo from AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer and strategic communications director Eric Hauser:
Trump is at 36 percent among union members in the five battleground states of FL, NV, OH, PA and WI.
Trump has gone to extreme lengths and made unconventional statements for a modern Republican candidate to try and make his assertion a reality. And our internal polling showed in mid-June he held 41 percent among union members in the five battleground states. His efforts have become a central storyline of his campaign.
But today, our new internal polling shows Trump with only 36 percent of union members in those same states. Behind the force of the labor movement’s consistent and strategic political program, Donald Trump has fallen by five points among union members in key states.
This new finding is supported by the recently released NBC/Wall Street Journal survey which shows Trump at 35 percent among union households nationally. Notably, this drop in Trump’s support among union members is larger than that of the general public which barely budged from 38.9 percent to 37 percent according to Pollster.com.
Why would polls show that kind of drop among union members when the general public has stayed relatively static? Because “We are educating our members”—cycle after cycle, unions do a fantastic job of outreach to members for whom the union is a trusted resource, and it shows up in union members’ votes on Election Day. (This is one of the reasons Republicans have spent recent decades waging war on unions, by the way.)
Black and Latino union members probably don’t need to hear from their unions to be persuaded to vote against Trump, but labor outreach to white members could make a difference in key battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.
