Vice President Kamala Harris’ allies in organized labor have begun a late drive to help her with white working-class voters, her weakest demographic, in the face of great skepticism over inflation, old grudges about free trade, new ones about student-loan forgiveness, and a profound blue-collar affinity for former President Donald Trump.

Working America, a political affiliate of the AFL-CIO built to reach nonunion workers, has around 1,600 paid canvassers knocking on doors in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on any given day — just one part of a concerted effort by organized labor to eat into Trump’s advantage and deliver a Democratic victory through sheer hustle.

“We are the difference-makers in the election,” said Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions.

But beneath the bravado is realism.

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Harris Favored in Pennsylvania Poll

For Harris, there is no sugarcoating her numbers with white working-class voters. This month, a poll of Pennsylvania by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer found the vice president leading Trump overall, 50% to 47%. But Trump led by 7 percentage points among likely voters without a college degree.

Among white voters without a college degree, that gap grew to a chasm: 58% favored Trump, 40% Harris. By a wide margin, 57% to 41%, college-educated voters said Harris would be better than Trump at helping the working class. But if educational attainment is a stand-in for class, the white working class trusts Trump; 56% say he would help them best, compared with 41% who say that about the vice president.

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April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, said Democratic hand-wringing over a slight slippage of support among Black men misses the real problem.

“It is white men and white women who vote for Donald Trump. We’re not going to sway the majority of them, but over time, we have to tackle that challenge,” she said.

The working class’s issues with Harris are complex and, with less than two weeks until Election Day, probably not remediable. As Zaeveona Rainey, 25, a canvasser and crew chief for Working America, made her way on Oct. 17 through Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, a mostly white working-class suburb of Pittsburgh, she found very few voters who were not already dug in.

Older working-class voters still associate the party with the free-trade principles of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, an association emphasized by Trump’s protectionist takeover of the Republican Party, said Michael Podhorzer, who recently retired as the AFL-CIO’s longtime political chief. Many younger working-class voters, crushed economically by the coronavirus pandemic, then hit by inflation just as they emerged from isolation, appear to have given up.

“Most young working-class people, for good reason, think Democrats, Republicans or the political class have done nothing for them,” Podhorzer said. “People don’t trust the system.”

But as Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, sees it, there are voters to reach with a large enough army. He has a theory to drive the canvassers blanketing the swing states — that the personal connections they make night after night will make a difference.

“It’s a numbers game,” Morrison said. “You get to enough people on a large enough scale to get to the soft commits or undecideds.”

And union leaders say they are making the effort, while acknowledging the headwinds.

“I want to stress, we still have work to do,” said Lee Saunders, president of the 1.6-million-strong American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and chairman of the AFL-CIO’s political committee, “especially in the economic areas.”

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Harris Campaign Believes They Have Winning Strategy

The Harris campaign believes it has a winning strategy for winning enough working-class votes in the closing days of the campaign, through union hall visits by Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota; labor surrogates leading the outreach; and advertising strategically placed in college and professional football games and other major sporting events.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Harris told union workers in Lansing, Michigan, on Oct. 18, “Donald Trump’s track record is a disaster for working people, and he is an existential threat to America’s labor movement.”

Organized labor insists it can break through. On Saturday, a coalition of industrial and service-industry unions began a final push their leaders say will reach 5 million union members. Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, has become one of Harris’ most trusted surrogates, barnstorming through Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Public sector unions, such as AFSCME, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, may have their existence at stake: The Trump allies who wrote the Project 2025 blueprint for another Trump term have vowed to phase them out.

More than 5,000 SEIU members would be knocking on more than a million doors in the final drive to get out the vote.

Morrison portrayed chipping away at Trump’s advantage almost as a science, and he brandished the numbers to prove it. Through follow-up call and control groups, he said Working America concluded it had netted 250,000 additional votes for Democratic candidates in 2022, 90,000 of them for John Fetterman, the victorious Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, 21,000 for Katie Hobbs, now the governor of Arizona.

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On a recent day in Pittsburgh, around 250 canvassers had come up from Atlanta to supplement the Pennsylvania crew set to blanket the working-class suburbs south of the Ohio River. At a training session that afternoon, they were advised to highlight Harris’ policies, and not to try to convince people Trump is bad.

Be personable and memorable, they were told. If voters identify themselves as Trump supporters most concerned about immigration, move on. They are set. If a Trump voter says he is most concerned about health care, lean in. That person could flip.

Rainey did not find many of those “soft commits.” There was Michael Carden, 42, a meat cutter in what he called “a very blue-collar job,” who told her on Oct. 17 that he was adamantly for Harris.

“I’ve thought a lot about who I am and what has become of us since 2016,” he said. “What Trump brought out in people, it’s made me think a lot less of a lot of folks.”

But Trump supporters had their own reasons. One cited President Joe Biden’s “giveaway” to college graduates who have had student loans forgiven. A 55-year-old landscaper who declined to give his name liked Trump’s swagger and unpredictability in an unstable world.

“It’s like having Mike Tyson walking behind you,” he said of Trump’s foreign policy.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jonathan Weisman/Kristian Thacker
c. 2024 The New York Times Company