The Rise of the Union Right

Richard Tikey builds coke-oven doors for U.S. Steel. He’s a union guy, through and through: He’s been a union member for 26 years, and is now the vice president of his local, the United Steelworkers 1557 in Clairton, Pennsylvania. He has spent much of his adult life voting for Democrats.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden lobbied hard for votes like Tikey’s. The Biden administration increased tariffs on foreign steel and spent hundreds of billions on heavy infrastructure. It supported union drives, stocked the National Labor Relations Board with worker-friendly lawyers, banned noncompete clauses, expanded eligibility for overtime, cracked down on union busting, and extended protections for civil servants. Biden was the first president in history to walk a picket line.

In contrast, Donald Trump has supported “right to work” laws, attempted to gut federal worker protections, and named union busters to lead the Department of Labor and the NLRB. He has also supported firing workers on strike, stiffed contractors for his campaigns and businesses, described American wages as “too high,” and bragged that he denied his own workers overtime pay.

Even so, weeks before the election, Tikey appeared in a lime-green hard hat and a Steelworkers for Trump T-shirt, giving a thumbs-up for cameras alongside the once and future president. “Why would we support Democrats?” Tikey told me this month. “Every time we have a Republican in office, things are better.”

Millions of other union members feel the same way. Exit polls indicate that nearly half of union households voted Republican in 2024, up from 43 percent in 2016 and 37 percent in 2000. Other polling shows that Trump commanded a 26-point lead among white voters without a college degree in union homes, up nine points since 2020. Conversely, Democratic support dropped 35 percentage points among Latino voters in union households, and also waned among Black union voters.

These trends are part of a long, slow tectonic electoral realignment. This century, the country has become less polarized in income terms, with Democrats gaining among coastal elites and Republicans among the working class. In the past decade, it has also become less racially polarized, with Black, Asian, and Latino voters shifting red. And education has become a much stronger predictor of a person’s partisanship. Democrats now dominate among the college-educated, and Republicans dominate among white people without a degree.

The Republican coalition has become more diverse, while the Democrats have seen their working-class base—the working-class base that delivered them election after election in the 20th century—walk away. What would it take to get voters like Tikey to come back?

First, Democrats need to understand how they lost them. The commonly told story is an economic one, which I have heard from union leaders, the Bernie left, and blue-collar voters who have started voting Republican. The Democrats have more liberal economic policies than the GOP: They support higher taxes on the wealthy and more progressive spending. But this is not the same thing as being pro-worker. And the party has shed voters as it has become more corporatist, pro-globalization, and cosmopolitan.

A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed NAFTA, which cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the heartland and suppressed wages. A Democratic president, Barack Obama, failed to pass “card check,” which would have made forming unions radically easier. He also negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which unions argued would send American jobs overseas. More broadly, Democrats failed to prevent the collapse of the unionized workforce, two decades of stagnation in middle-income wages, and the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt. Their answer was to “compensate the losers,” rather than avoid policies that generated losers to begin with. This cost them votes, as well as credibility among many working-class voters.

“Beginning with Jimmy Carter, there was an increasing effort to see unions and labor as a special interest, rather than a foundational part of the party,” Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “There hasn’t been a political party in this country with working people at the table for decades. This is the bed the Democrats made for themselves, and it obviously has not paid off in the way they anticipated.”

At the same time, particularly in the past decade, Republicans have become more economically populist. The mainstream of the party now promotes restricting trade and running enormous deficits, even during economic expansions. They may threaten to make huge cuts to popular social programs, but rarely actually do so. The Affordable Care Act lives on; Medicare and Social Security remain untouched. Trump signed a stimulus bill twice as large as Obama’s.

Neither party delivered what it promised, economy-wise. It cost the Democrats and helped the GOP.

Political scientists and pollsters layer a cultural story onto this economic story. Since the 1970s, academics have noted that as societies have become wealthier, their voters have tended to care less about bread-and-butter financial issues and life-and-death defense ones. They begin voting on topics such as the environment, immigration, gender equity, and civil rights. (Academics call this “postmaterialism.”) People can “choose parties on the basis of their overall social and cultural views,” Matthew Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, told me.

Voters on both the right and the left have become postmaterial. The college-educated have aligned with the Democrats, attracted by the party’s views on climate change and racial equality. Non-college-educated voters have shifted toward the Republicans on the basis of immigration, abortion, and race. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and strategist, told me that Trump’s coalition might have been slightly lower-income than Harris’s during this election. If so, it would likely be the first time the Republican coalition was less wealthy than the Democratic coalition in decades. “You have the party of the working class versus the professional class,” he said, but it’s “cultural issues that are driving these changes.”

The greater emphasis on cultural issues has posed problems for both parties in their appeals to the American center, even as it has attracted votes too. In 2022, voters turned away from the GOP after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. (Some pollsters expected the same in 2024, but other issues predominated.) In the past three elections, the left’s position on immigration has alienated it from Latino voters it was desperately trying to hang on to. As my colleague Rogé Karma writes, these voters didn’t care about immigration as much as they cared about kitchen-table economics, and many had less liberal opinions about the border than professional Democrats.

The Democrats’ positions have proved the more alienating ones for the small-c conservative American public—something the party has been slow to acknowledge. “The Democratic Party is incredibly well educated and has incredibly liberal views on social issues, relative to the population as a whole,” Grossmann noted. “It is just not very easy to change that.”

For all that cultural issues help explain how Democrats lost the working class over the past two decades, the economy nevertheless seems to have been the decisive factor in Trump’s 2024 victory.

In polls, voters consistently named high prices as their top concern. They consistently said they trusted Trump to do better on the issue of inflation. Democrats pointed to the good headline numbers in terms of GDP growth, inequality, jobs, and wages, as well as the inflation-rate decline since 2022. Voters felt like the Democrats were ignoring or gaslighting them. Harris did not criticize the Biden administration for its role in stoking inflation. This cost her votes and perhaps the election, a pattern that has played out for incumbent parties around the world.

The Biden administration also fumbled in making the case for its policies to middle-income voters. Biden and Harris passed a tremendous amount of legislation but struggled to distill the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and thousands of finicky provisions into tangible policy deliverables that the public could grasp. “While voters across party lines strongly supported Biden’s populist economic policies, many were not aware that his administration had enacted them,” an election postmortem by the left-of-center polling group Data for Progress found.

When I talked with voters during the campaign, I would often ask them what they thought Harris and Trump would do once in office. People tended to give specific answers for Trump, whether they themselves were a Democrat or a Republican. He’d enact tariffs, close the border, fire civil servants, and deport undocumented criminals. Even motivated Democrats, I found, struggled to name Harris’s top priorities. Someone might respond with 10 answers or sometimes none.

The candidates the Democrats ran and the strategies their campaigns deployed were less-than-ideal too. Biden’s age and Harris’s lack of authentic connection with voters, something that’s hard to measure but not hard to see, were obstacles to victory. The Democrats’ character-based vilification of Trump failed to connect for many voters who liked the guy and supported his policies. “People underestimated the appeal of Trump’s message to nonwhite working-class audiences,” Ruffini told me. “They didn’t think it could cross over.”

History suggests that things will get easier for Democrats, in some ways. If past trends hold, the party will pick up five or more points in the midterms without doing anything. The Republicans will start passing policies and instantly become less popular in the eyes of voters, left and right. And in the next presidential campaign, the Democrats will benefit from being able to run unencumbered by incumbency, against Trumpism, if not Trump himself.

Still, pollsters and political scientists told me, the party needs to change. The “Brahmin left”—meaning the educated elite that now makes up the Democratic Party’s base—is not a big enough bloc to defeat Republicans going forward. Democrats have to get back at least some members of the middle class, the working poor, and the unions.

In terms of kitchen-table policies, well, the Democrats need to have some. Just a few. Big ones. Popular ones that are easy to understand. A bill that caps the price of all prescription drugs at $25 a month, say, rather than a 19-point policy white paper.

The content of such proposals matters too. The Brahmin left tends to be more supportive of redistribution than the working class, which tends to prefer something that economists call “predistribution”: high minimum wages rather than welfare payments, pro-union policies rather than refundable tax credits, antitrust measures rather than food stamps. Moderate families also give higher marks to social spending that feels like infrastructure: universal pre-K, guaranteed jobs programs, and public internet.

The cultural drift of the party will be harder to change, political analysts told me. Tacking to the center would mean repudiating activists on immigration, the environment, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and abortion—the same activists who have marched in the streets, raised money, and knocked on doors for Democrats, and have become its most loyal voters. It would mean ignoring many of Washington’s most powerful nonprofits and interest groups. “I’m a progressive,” Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, told me. “I’m not even sure it would work, because the reputation of the party is so set in.”

Indeed, Harris brought up that she was a gun owner and ran on her record as a prosecutor. She did not emphasize trans-rights issues, nor did she use the term Latinx in speeches. What did her relative centrism get her?

Still, pollsters noted that some politicians have had success with their cultural appeals to more conservative voters: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington. It might not take much more than loudly rejecting some far-left positions, Ruffini told me. “You have to have someone come out and say: ‘Here’s what I’m for and I’m against. And I don’t like some of this cultural stuff.’ Create a clear moment of contrast and differentiation.”

I asked Tikey which issues drew him to the Republicans. He made more money under Republicans, he told me (though union data show that workers got large profit-sharing payments under Biden). He thought Trump would do better on inflation, and he appreciated the GOP’s stance on abortion, gender, and guns. Plus, he said, “I don’t understand why unions endorse Democrats when they want to shut down” plants like the one he works in. He has a point. Democrats are not vowing to save coal plants, for instance. They’re promising to compensate the losers.

In the future, could a more centrist Democrat, in cultural and economic terms, win Tikey over? “The Democratic Party has changed,” he told me. It just isn’t the party that he and many of his neighbors supported back in the 1990s. “I don’t think so,” he said.