As the International Brotherhood of Teamsters worked to build inroads with the GOP during the 2024 election and its aftermath, records show that its headquarters was still overwhelmingly cutting checks to liberals, including a contribution to Attorney General Jay Jones (D-VA) made after the press reported on text messages in which Jones fantasized about killing Republicans.
The Teamsters made national headlines in 2024 for bucking the norms of organized labor by mulling an endorsement of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, cutting a check to the Republican National Committee, and sending union president Sean O’Brien to address the Republican National Convention. While the Teamsters ultimately decided to stay neutral in the presidential race, media outlets ran scores of pieces discussing the possibility of a political realignment within organized labor. Disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Labor, however, show that the Teamsters still overwhelmingly used their financial might to back liberal causes between 2024 and early 2026.
“We answer to workers, not political parties,” Teamsters spokeswoman Kara Deniz told the Washington Examiner. “In the past year, Teamsters’ contributions to Republicans who support American workers have proportionately increased as more elected officials from both parties recognize the value of organized labor.”
While it’s true that the Teamsters are giving a greater percentage of their overall contributions to Republicans than in past cycles, the union’s strong preference for funding Democratic committees remains out of step with the rank-and-file members’ preferences.
More than 80% of the donations made by the Teamsters’ national PAC from January 2025 to February 2026 went to Democratic candidates and committees, a Washington Examiner review found. By contrast, a poll commissioned by the Teamsters in the lead-up to the 2024 election found that just 31% of its members wanted the union to endorse then-Vice President Kamala Harris, compared to 58% who backed a Trump endorsement.
A fledgling alliance
Some conservatives view the Teamsters’ outreach to the GOP with skepticism, arguing that the policies pushed by unions are inherently out of step with conservatism and that union organizers themselves are still generally liberal.
“As for whether the Teamsters is compatible with the GOP, the union officialdom isn’t,” Mike Watson, an organized labor expert and director of research at the Capital Research Center, told the Washington Examiner. “The members are more open to the GOP for social-issues reasons, but the staffer class and officers are largely committed Everything Leftists.”
“Everything Leftism” is a turn of phrase used to describe the tendency of some liberal staffers and activists to adopt causes seemingly unrelated to their primary area of focus; environmental groups issuing statements about the war in Gaza is one such example. In a similar vein, many leaders in the labor movement place emphasis on issues such as LGBT rights, abortion policy, and climate change, despite those topics being tangential to the goals of unions themselves.
Proponents of strengthened ties between the Republican Party and organized labor, meanwhile, argue that the social liberalism pushed by some corporate entities and the relative social conservatism of blue-collar workers make the GOP and organizations such as the Teamsters natural allies.
The Teamsters themselves, however, are still making campaign donations to some of the most socially liberal members of the Democratic Party. Since 2025, the Teamsters have cut checks to, among others, Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D-NY), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Rep. Chuy García (D-IL), and New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who famously prosecuted Trump.
Weeks after National Review published text messages in which Jones, then the Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general, said he would murder Republican lawmaker Todd Gilbert if given the opportunity and stated that it would be a good thing if Gilbert’s children were killed as well, the Teamsters cut a $5,000 check to his inaugural committee.
Deniz, the Teamsters spokeswoman, did not comment specifically on the contribution to Jones when asked about it.
The Teamster’s LM-2 disclosures from 2024 and 2025, which document the union’s financial activities rather than its political committee, indicate that during the two years O’Brien was working to convince the GOP to work with him, his organization only made one political donation to an explicitly conservative group.
Of the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Teamsters spent on “political activities and lobbying” between 2024 and 2025, and among myriad groups it supported, the only GOP organization it funded was the Republican Main Street Partnership, which received a $50,000 contribution in 2025.
“‘Good faith’ or ‘bad faith’ isn’t the right way to think about O’Brien’s outreach game,” Watson told the Washington Examiner. “I think he’s a shrewd special-interest operator, just like the National Association of Realtors or other play-both-sides lobby groups. He wants to make sure his interests as union boss and organizer aren’t ‘on the menu’ when his team isn’t in power — the Democrats will protect his boss-organizer interests anyway because it’s in their ideological and coalitional interests.
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“So playing open to the GOP is tactically shrewd, and not something we’ve seen from a major union since the Feds got the Mafia out of the Teamsters national leadership in the early 1990s,” Watson said.
Indeed, the Teamsters have been able to win real concessions from the Trump administration following their ingratiation campaign. The union, for example, saw Lori Chavez-DeRemer, their preferred candidate for head of the Department of Labor, be nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate during the early months of 2025.