Source: AFP
Working-class voters in Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh used to overwhelmingly favor Democrats, but years of economic hardship and the rise of social issues that favor Republicans have made them a swing district again in 2024 .
President Joe Biden cleared a key hurdle, winning endorsements from union presidents including the United Steelworkers (USW), a key player in the US Steel takeover battle that emerged during the 2024 campaign in Pennsylvania.
But how many workers ignore union leaders and vote for Donald Trump could have a decisive impact in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where the margin could be 100,000 votes or less.
Biden supporters point to the incumbent’s reliable support of organized labor, ties to the working class of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and legislative accomplishments like the 2021 Infrastructure Act.
“We’ve heard four years of Donald Trump talking about infrastructure, because there was a lot of talk,” steelworker JoJo Burgess said in a Biden ad. “Joe Biden delivered.”
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“Right now, we have the most pro-American labor president in office that we’ve ever had,” said Burgess, who is also the mayor of Washington, Pennsylvania.
But Rudy Sanetta, a maintenance worker at US Steel, prefers Trump on the economy and because of his stance on gun rights.
“I like him for his resistance to politicians,” Sanetta said of Trump. “The other, I have no confidence.”
Working-class voters “are the most decisive because they’re the ones who have really demonstrated that they’re willing to choose either Trump or Biden,” said Jonathan Servas, a political scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Exit polling from Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2020 suggests that the shift to Biden by white working-class voters who favored Trump in 2016 “significantly affected the difference between victory and defeat,” according to a May paper of progressive political consultant Mike Lux Media and his organized group with the support of In Union Labor.
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However, the newspaper pointed to recent polling that showed a drop in Biden’s support among union households in Wisconsin and Michigan, while Pennsylvania was unchanged from 2020.
“Democrats need to understand that these working-class Heartland voters have been through a lot of hard times over the past few decades,” said the paper, which urged timely outreach from credible sources tied to voters’ “real-world experience to deal with digital misinformation and social pressure’.
Corrosive support
Since Trump’s political emergence, there has been considerable debate about the different reasons for the erosion of white working-class support for Democrats.
Some commentators see Trump’s 2016 upset as at least partly a racial backlash after Barack Obama’s presidency and Trump’s embrace of issues like illegal immigration.
Other commentators, such as Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute, have characterized the Democratic Party’s progressive positions on issues such as police reform and transgender rights as alienating voters who are more culturally conservative.
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His 2023 book “Rust Belt Union Blues,” a case study in the Pittsburgh area, points to the after-effects of the industrial recession of the 1970s and 1980s that led to massive job losses and closed unions, weakening the bargaining power of employees with the companies.
The recession also reduced the community role of unions, which once held picnics and other gatherings where members wore colorful pins promoting their local. This contributed to a solidarity oriented around issues such as fair wages and health care.
While unions still carry out some activities, many workers who survived industry contractions now socialize around religion and hunting, where politically oriented groups lean conservative, according to authors Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol.
Pocket matters
Bernie Hall, who leads the USW Pennsylvania region, agreed that many union members have diverse affiliations, but said labor remains central.
Source: AFP
“Especially in western Pennsylvania, you know people really identify with the union,” he said.
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Hall, who praised Biden as a “blue-collar” Democrat who has delivered to voters, predicted that Biden would win a majority of steelworkers but acknowledged that Trump has significant support.
Some workers turned to Trump after decades of industrial decline to “blow up” the system, Hall said, adding, “I still think there’s an appeal to that for some people.”
Alex Barna, an engineer at US Steel, was a lifelong Democrat who voted for Obama. But since 2016, Barna has voted for Trump twice and will do so again, crediting the former president’s tax cuts with a healthy pre-Covid-19 economy.
“What affected us was pocket money and pocket money” was good, said Barna’s wife, Ellen, contrasting it with today’s higher inflation.
“A lot of people think about the four years of bad tweets,” said Helen Barna. “At least we lived better.”
Source: AFP