When former President Donald Trump walked into the headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters on Wednesday, he became the first Republican presidential candidate to have a real shot at the union’s endorsement in more than 30 years.
The last time that the Teamsters union, one of the nation’s most powerful labor unions, endorsed a Republican candidate for president was in 1988 when it backed George H.W. Bush. Since then, it has endorsed the Democratic nominee in eight consecutive presidential elections.
But with the Teamsters now under new management, the union’s willingness to even speak to Trump is a recognition by the organization’s leadership that rank-and-file union members are no longer a slam dunk to vote Democratic.
In 2020, President Joe Biden beat Trump among union members by 22 points, but he lost union voters without a college degree by 6 points, according to a Harvard University survey. And if current polls are to be believed, the two men are tied among union voters in their expected November rematch.
Biden’s 2020 performance was an improvement over Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she won the national union vote by a mere 8 points, according to that year’s exit polls. In contrast, Obama won the union vote by double digits in 2008 and 2012.
Labor unions have traditionally been an electoral force for Democratic candidates. But as the Republican Party has become an increasingly working-class party in the years since Trump came on the scene, the union vote has become more splintered.
While Biden likes to say that he is the most pro-union president in history, his administration’s policies of open borders and onerous environmental regulations have continued to gut communities that were once supported by union manufacturing jobs. It is no surprise then that Trump’s message of populism, with its promise of protectionist tariffs on foreign imports and restrictions on immigration, has resonated with rank-and-file union voters.
For decades, Republican politicians have largely written off unions and their voters, often passing laws meant to make union busting efforts easier. But as Trump showed in 2016, a lane exists for Republicans to benefit from a more union-friendly economic message, especially as blue-collar voters continue to move away from the Democratic Party.
Nikki Haley, Trump’s lone remaining challenger in the Republican primary, doesn’t see this path forward and accused the former president of becoming a liberal while touting her anti-union record as the governor of South Carolina.
“If Donald Trump agrees with the Teamsters on gutting right-to-work laws, pushing for amnesty, spending trillions of dollars, and funding liberal causes, then he should get on the debate stage and explain his liberal stances to Republican primary voters,” a spokesperson for Haley’s campaign said.
But what Haley’s campaign fails to realize is that the GOP’s road to building a majority coalition requires the support of working-class voters in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, three states that hold the keys to a majority of the Electoral College. And many of these voters belong to labor unions.
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Trump, by meeting with the Teamsters, is showing yet again that he is willing to put in the work required to build that winning coalition of working-class voters. And while the leadership of the union was not receptive to some of his policy goals, especially on immigration, the rank-and-file members will ultimately have a say.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said after the meeting that a poll of rank-and-file Teamsters members will play a significant factor in who the union ultimately endorses or if they endorse a candidate at all. If recent polls are any indication, Trump may very well win that survey. If he does, his willingness to buck the Republican Party’s traditional hostility to organized labor may end up being the reason he returns to the White House.