Teamsters And The Death Of Transactional Politics
On Material Conditions And Realignments
Kamala Harris has had plenty of good polls since her dominant debate performance. It’s really hard to see how she is not currently favoured to win at this point, even if there’s obviously a decent chance of either the polls snapping back to Trump before the election or the polls being wrong again. (I really doubt that there will be anything like the 2020 miss again, given the financial incentives of pollsters, but I didn’t expect a 2020 miss in 2020 so, you know, I have to be open minded.)
Frankly the horse race stuff is only so interesting, and I did Px3 last week where we ostensibly focused on 6 House seats and ended up hitting everything if you want my broader takes. It’s also incredibly likely I’ll get greenlight for a post-debate Lines piece about today’s NYT/Siena polls and What It All Means. But last week’s announcement that the Teamsters Union released data (including what should be at least somewhat representative scientific polling) saying Donald Trump is the preferred candidate of their members, and that they’re not giving a national endorsement is fascinating. This is the same union who got a $36B bailout of their pension in the American Rescue Plan, which has earned Kamala Harris the indignity of the Teamsters boss speaking at the RNC and then no national endorsement of her.
The real lesson of this is simple, I think - Democrats need to stop being nostalgic for their old coalition and get more comfortable with the ascendant Democratic coalition. And they need to do so immediately, or else they’ll find themselves getting mad about the wrong fights.
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There has been an idea, since Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because of collapsing support in working class America, that the solution for Democrats is to prioritize “material conditions” over the social issues that oftentimes animate their coalition. Sometimes this advice boils down to “ignore abortion rights and gay rights”, which is dumb, but even the smart version of this argument is that workers are rational people who will vote for their self-interest if Democrats respond accordingly.
It was a theoretically good argument until 2021, when Democrats did the thing that people allegedly want. The left of the Democratic Party said for years that they would accept higher prices in exchange for retail and fast food workers getting higher wages. Then the US prioritized full employment over fighting inflation and the left criticized the President for price hikes. Make it make sense without just admitting they’re all hypocrites, please. You can’t.
But in specific, this is still a big tell that material conditions aren’t moving votes. These voters being socially conservative isn’t a shock. Union voters in America only voted for Biden by 14% per the AP VoteCast in 2020, and that includes a lot of white collar union workers like teachers, nurses, and government workers who presumably lean substantially more to the left than 56/42. That means that it’s not a shock that a working class, blue collar union might have a workforce that’s open to Trump and MAGA politics.
But it’s also the case that their material conditions did not materially change the Teamster’s willingness to vote for Harris. It’s not exactly great for the standing of American unions that they’re so weak, but it’s also not great for those who actually believe in unions and organizing as a central principle. Because as much as Democrats may want to support unions, at the end of the day the party will do what it needs to to win, and it’s clear that the only path forward is socially liberal moderates.
The clear trend both in America and generally across the world has been the increase in social values dictating vote intention. Areas of socially liberal thought have trended left, areas with culturally conservative voters have moved right. This is true of Southlake and Youngstown in America, Milton and Timmins in Canada, the entire Blue and Red Walls in England, and plenty of Australian examples too. This is the Global Fucking Realignment I have spent so many column inches ranting about. But it’s interesting to get such a clear proof that nothing else truly does matter.
This will end up mattering to the policy mix of the Democratic Party, and frankly it already has. Let’s be real, do you think Kamala would be walking away from some of the tax positions Biden took if she didn’t have Mark Cuban in her ear and Forsyth and the Milwaukee and Philadelphia collars in mind? Harris is correctly responding to incentives, which is that socially liberal, pro-choice voters in the WOW or Forsyth or Maricopa are much more likely to be truly persuadable voters than Obama-Trump-Trump voters in Youngstown or Duluth or Scranton.
The dirty little secret of my homosexuality is that it has always been safer to be openly gay in places that in some cases voted for Mitt Romney by 60% than it is to be open about your sexuality in Obama-Trump counties. And this is another example of the fact that the GFR is the dominant political divide in America, and won’t be undone or wound down at this election.
The Teamsters membership are openly hostile to an Administration that should have been a Godsend to them. That’s fine, but we shouldn’t be surprised when a Harris admin or whoever comes next if she loses is much more willing to cater to well off suburban moderates than they are to blue collar unions at a time when the unions don’t deliver in response. And from a campaign perspective, it’s high time for Harris to stop leaking out her moderation on economics as some dirty secret and start owning it.
The path to a Democratic win, and a Democratic majority in the House, runs through the suburbs. It runs through well off people who support abortion rights and are comfortable with homosexuality in both theory and in reality. It is time for the Democratic Party to try and win their votes on both economic and social grounds. I am not advocating for upper rate tax cuts, but the Democratic platform has a bunch of tax policies that everybody knows will never get through Congress. What Harris should do is formalize that status, ditch them, and understand who the Democratic Party should be doing transactional politics for now.
Also the unions in the US are infected by a particular odious disease. More and more people in the US are not anymore motivated by making the world a better place for all, or at least by making it a better place for themselves. There is a growing group that is more motivated to make the world a worse place for people that they consider “other”. They are getting satisfaction from making life more miserable for others, even if that makes life worse for themselves as well (as long as it is worse for the others).
Trump tapped into this sentiment brilliantly and convinced large groups to completely vote against their own interests, just because he promised to make life miserable or a complete hell for “others”. These people cannot not be convinced by sound policy or a rationale on how their lives would improve under a different president, they are not interested in this at all.
Unfortunately we are seeing the same in Canada. It is easy to pick on trans children and teachers who are trying to protect them. It is much harder and expensive to fund public properly and provide a decent education. Slowly but surely, also in Canada, we are going see politicians tap into these kind of sentiments.
I'm calling BS on this. I am extremely dubious that "blue collar" union types are any more homophobic, racist, etc than any other group. I would like too see some proof, if you don't mind. What the Teamsters recognize is that the Democrats are party of Wall Street. After all, who was in power when all of the bail-outs occurred? The Democrats have already made their feelings about the "deplorables" quite clear. Why then should those people be expected to vote for the Democrats?