To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members

The big blind spot.

An enlightened citizen. (Photo: Getty)

The election went bad and now we are in the time when everyone races to write about How The Democrats Can Get Back on Track. Let me, up front, try to be clear about what I am going to write here, so the point doesn’t get subsumed into the enormous universe of post-election muck. This is not an existential “What did the election mean?” piece. (I wrote one of those for In These Times already.) Nor is this a piece saying “You, the reader, should join a union, because unions are good.” Nor is this a piece about why the Democrats should push more leftist policies because leftist policies are good. Nor is this going to be a piece where I, some schmo, pose as the campaign manager of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign and say all the tactical choices that I would have done differently in order to put us over the edge with “swing voters.”

There are a lot of those types of pieces and some of them are fine and I may even write some of them myself, given time. But I’m trying to drill down on a more specific point today.

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Fewer voters turned out to vote for Democrats in 2024 than in 2020, and so they lost. On top of lower turnout, Democrats are also seeing some of their Latino voters and some of their lower and medium-income voters migrate to the Republican Party. There is, to a certain degree, a genuine realignment in which Democrats become more of a party of educated and higher-income voters, as well as black voters, and Republicans make inroads with lower-income voters and non-college-educated voters. It is important to say that these pendulums can swing back and forth depending on the specific candidates, and the Republican candidate after Trump is not guaranteed to continue these trends. It is also important to say that this idea of a new party bifurcation has already crystallized into a narrative, and the narrative is driving the public discussion of it at this point more than the data is, especially among political operatives with something to sell. Still, broadly speaking, the Democrats do appear to be losing working class voters—an existential problem for the party that is supposed to represent the left half of economic policy.

We can diagnose this voter shift as being a result of the Democrats being a hollow corporate shell that doesn’t fight for leftist policies, and we can point out that Kamala Harris’s brother in law is Uber’s top lawyer, which is a job that surely destines you for hell. I am not going to get into this sort of diagnosis today, though. It’s important to recognize the difference between “The Democrats should do leftist policy because it is good for humanity” and “The Democrats should do leftist policy because that is a winning electoral strategy.” These two separate arguments get conflated on both ends, and mixed together, and it makes the discussion hard to parse because even the honest people start talking past each other, and the majority of people are just arguing for their own personal policy preferences rather than being honest anyhow. This is why these arguments generally break down into either “I am a centrist and the Democrats lost because voters hate their leftist policies” or “I am a leftist and the Democrats lost because voters hate their centrist policies.”

The interesting and useful type of discussion to be had is: How do we get the Democrats to do policy that is good for humanity and also be electorally successful? We need both ingredients for any of this to be worth a damn. So let’s consider what happened in this election. Democrats are losing their appeal with the working class, and failing to energize voters enough to turn out to the polls. This makes some Democratic policy wonks mad. They point out all of the pro-union policies that the Biden administration embraced. He unlocked tens of billions of dollars to save union pensions. He nominated great people at the NLRB. He tried to pass the PRO Act. He was, as has been discussed at length here and elsewhere, the most pro-union president in generations, although the bar is low.

And indeed, guess which segment of the working class stuck with the Democrats in 2024? Union voters. NBC and CNN exit polls say that Harris won union voters by 8 points, even as Republicans won voters with incomes under $50k and under $100k. For all of the ink that got spilled in the past year about who the Teamsters would endorse and whether there really is such a thing as a “working class Republican,” the numbers show that actual members of unions remained a solid Democratic demographic even as the working class at large drifted to the right.

Here is the most important point I will make in this column: “Union members” and “the working class” are not synonyms. Ten percent of American workers today are union members, meaning that 90% of “the working class” are not union members. Joe Biden did a lot of good things for union members. So union members backed the Democrats. What does all of that mean to the other 90% of working people? Nothing. So the working class at large drifts away.

What is missing from this photo? Ten million more union members.

Do you want to make the working class vote Democratic? You need to make more of the working class union members.

This is pretty straightforward. Yet we are awash in hazy and misguided punditry because being “pro-union” so often gets conflated with being pro-working-class. (I hope that it goes without saying that Trump is neither pro-union nor pro-working class and his appeal is pure bullshit. Yet it is the fact that so many voters don’t understand the benefit of Democratic policies on their own lives that they become susceptible to Trump’s lies.) Biden spent a lot of political capital helping unions and their members. That did not accrue to the Democrats in the form of a bazillion votes and sky high approval ratings, and so some political analysts concluded that spending political capital to help unions is not worth it, electorally speaking. Well. That is not true. The conclusion to draw here is not that Democrats should abandon unions. It is that Democrats need more people to be union members.

Please notice the particular form of this argument. I’m not saying “you should be a union member” (though you should) and I’m not saying “America needs more union members in order to balance out the vicious power of capital in the class war” (though it does). I am saying that the Democratic Party’s own fate is tied to the creation of more union members in this country. It is not enough for Democrats to just pass, say, worker-friendly tax credits, and then get mad when working people don’t reward them. In order for the risk/ reward of pro-worker policies to work out electorally, you need working people to be a part of some institution that represents them and is engaged in the political system on their behalf and represents their interests and also does political education to keep them informed of all this stuff. The institutions I’m talking about are unions. Unions are uniquely credible institutions with union members. They can say to working people, “We are made up of you, we administer the contract that gives you your great benefits, we do political work on your behalf, and based on our expertise doing political work on your behalf, we can tell you which party and which candidate is more amenable to your interests.” That message, from a good union to a member, is one trillion times more credible than the same message would be going to an average voter from a political party. It is not surprising that unions went hard for the Democrats in this election, and got their members to buck the broader trend of working people going Republican.

Now, here is the other important part. All of the pro-union stuff Biden did helped existing union members, but it did not do a whole lot to create more union members. For one thing, creating more union members is not the job of politicians. It is the job of unions. Politicians can only pass friendlier regulations to remove some of the legal barriers that make union organizing harder. But politicians do not and cannot organize working people into unions. Union organizers do that. Union density continued to decline throughout the presidency of the most pro-union president in my lifetime. Is that Joe Biden’s fault? Not really. It is the fault of unions themselves. They will need to spend a whole lot more money on new organizing in order to organize the next million or five million or ten million working people into unions. The unions have not spent that money. So the organizing has not taken place. So union density has continued to go down. So unions are only ten percent of the total work force. So, even though union members still vote Democratic, the electoral benefits are not as strong as they could be.

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You don’t just need to do good things for existing unions. You need to make more union members.

This is why I have argued that unions should not just lobby the friendly federal government for stuff to help their existing members—they should make it a priority to get money from the government to fund new union organizing. But unions have not asked for this. They take care of their existing members. But they don’t have enough members. Now Donald Trump is going to be president again.

Why do I keep repeating this point, like some sort of weird crank? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because, in the aftermath of this election, not even the big unions themselves are talking about a plan to organize many more union members. Why not? Because they do not have such a plan. That is not good.

Sometimes when I talk about this stuff I imagine somehow kidnapping the presidents of every major union in America and also kidnapping every national Democratic elected official and putting them all in a big room together and standing up and saying to them, “Hey: What you need to think about is creating more union members. It is vital, for unions, that we create new union members. It is vital, for the future of the Democratic Party, that we create new union members. And it is vital, for the entire working class, that we create new union members. In conclusion: Focus on how to get the money to spend on organizing to create new union members. Lots of them.”

Don’t just do nice things for today’s union members. Look at all the working people in this country and think about how to make them union members. Ninety percent of them are not union members. No union is giving them credible political education. And they are voting for the other guy. And then that guy is gonna do things that hurt them.

You know what One Neat Trick would remedy all of this? Create more union members. Organize more union members. Make more union members. A lot more. Please. If there is a better way to fight inequality and weaken Trump and his billionaire allies and strengthen the Democratic Party and achieve progressive goals all at once, I don’t know what it is.

Don’t just be pro-worker. Don’t just be pro-union. Create. More. Union members. It doesn’t fucking matter how pro-union you are if nobody’s in a union!

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Previously, on unions and politics: Correct and Incorrect Conclusions About Unions and Democrats; Listen: Republicans Do Not Want Unions to Exist; Ten Times This; Remaking the Coalition.

I also wrote a book about this topic. It’s called “The Hammer,” it’s about the labor movement, and it’s available for order wherever books are sold. I bet you would like it. I’ll be speaking about it at a few places soon—come out and talk to me about how we can save the country:

• Tuesday, November 12: Boston, MA. 12:15 pm at the Harvard Center for Labor & a Just Economy, in conversation with Michelle Miller. Event info and (free) registration is here.

• Thursday, December 5: Baltimore, MD. 7 pm at Red Emma’s, in conversation with Max Alvarez. Event info here.

• Saturday, December 28: Gainesville, FL. At The Lynx Books. Event link TK.