Lack of Endorsement From Teamsters Highlights the Disconnect between Leadership and Membership

The Teamsters’ union refusal to endorse anyone for President this past week is a culmination of a slow motion development within many trade unions.  For years there’s been a generic belief of unions always coming out on the political left. But that hasn’t been an accurate assessment of most of their memberships for some time.
 
Stories from the union’s decision concerning an internal poll that suggested the majority of the members support Donald Trump over Kamala Harris may have been a shock to some, but this isn’t a momentary shift. Indeed most suggestions say that as many as 2/3 of the members support the Republican nominee. And the moment of union and working class voters to the right has been a long term thing.
 
Starting as far back as the 1970s, there’s been ample evidence that a number of working class voters have slowly started to shift in a more conservative direction. Within the United States this culminated in the Reagan Democrat during the 1980s. As left-wing parties increasingly became more concentrated within Academia, their detachment from regular working people came to be a chasm to which most of the elected officials couldn’t could no longer relate with them.
 
It’s easy to put this up to parties on the left taking certain voters for granted. This has been a common argument for some time. Working class voters especially have been one that the left is seen as being there simply because there was nobody else who would pay attention to them. Academia itself as it moved increasingly towards the left came to see white working class males especially as a group they didn’t want to pay attention to.
 
What has garnered less attention however is that working class voters have never been as tied to the Democratic party as is sometimes believed. They’re a group that tends to change sides in any given election depending on what issues are pertinent and driving their interests in the moment. For most of them the results of elections typically have real effects on their lives. Things like job security or controlling and inflation are serious issues for their day to day affairs.
 
In a number of countries across Europe as well as the United States, working class voters have increasingly been shifting towards the right. This has been partly due to working-class voters being one of the most identifiable groups that oppose increased immigration. This is due to larger immigration typically means lower wages.
 
 Also most working class voters tend to be more culturally conservative. Within the US it’s easy to see this person as somebody who flies an American flag in their yard and watches John Wayne movies. In short they become divorced culturally as much as anything else from much of the East Coast Elites. This made them easy voting blocs for a party that would pay attention to their concerns to get a hearing from them.
 
This has led to the situation now where most union leadership, which is University educated, has increasingly become more tied to the intellectual elites on the coast. At the same time it means that they are more detached from the same members that they claim to speak for. That most of the union leadership tends to still speak well of the Democratic Party and suggest that most of their members would support it highlights the disconnect.
 
If the leadership was truly surprised by the members’ vote that went towards Donald Trump it speaks more to this detachment. No one should be surprised that the average Union voter no longer has much affinity for the inner workings of Washington DC. It wasn’t really a shock that the union membership would not endorse a Democrat like Kamala Harris. The shock was that those who say they speak for those people didn’t see that it was coming.

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