Unions: The Democrats' Lifeblood Past and Present

For those whose understanding of America's political battleground is centered around the red state/blue state turf wars of the Obama era, it may come as quite a shock to know that the heart and soul of the Democratic Party throughout the 20th century, and the last two-thirds of the 20th century in particular, came from culturally conservative West Virginia and east Kentucky.  These jurisdictions become more disconnected with each passing year from the profile that typifies the modern Democratic Party, but dozens of counties in both states that went 70+% for Mitt Romney in 2012 held strong for landslide Democratic losers like George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis not that long ago.   Many of them held on even through Al Gore and John Kerry as recently as 2004, although the tide was beginning to turn by then.

The cause of the region's dramatic transformation in the last decade isn't complicated--the Democratic Party turned against coal based on its contribution to global warming and accelerated the decline of the region's primary industry--but it's vital to acknowledge why this region was so overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party up to that point.  The easy answer:  unions.  At its peak, the coal industry employed hundreds of thousands of heavily unionized workers, and their participation in the union made them politically motivated, activated, and aligned with the left-leaning interests that the union and the Democratic Party were peddling.  As the decades passed, the coal mines became more automated, were forced to compete with cheaper overseas coal, and transitioned to (highly environmentally damaging) methods of coal extraction that greatly reduced the need for labor.   As a result, the coal industry that once employed hundreds of thousands in the heart of Appalachia was barely employing tens of thousands by the turn of the new millennium.  So even before the region began to identify the national Democratic Party with the "War on Coal", it's alignment with the Democratic Party was softening.  The aging cohort of retired miners most strongly affiliated with the unions and the Democratic Party were dying off while the young people who stuck around were less likely to be miners, less likely to be affiliated with the miners' union, and less likely to be persuaded by the economic arguments forwarded by the Democratic Party than their grandparents.  Just up the road in Appalachia in the hardscrabble steel mill towns of southwest Pennsylvania, a similar dynamic played out over a nearly identical time period, and can be similarly applied to hundreds of isolated communities dotting the Middle American landscape.

This background provides vital context for understanding the Democratic Party's future amidst the continued shrinkage of unions and the never-ending assault to exterminate them.  The conventional wisdom among political analysts is that demographics are on the Democrats' side to the point of ghettoizing Republicans to a sustained minority posture in national politics.  What this calculus has always misunderstood is voter engagement, and the "coalition of the ascendant" that got Obama elected twice in 2008 and 2012 also flamed out to two of history's most spectacular midterm election losses for the incumbent party in 2010 and 2014.  The degree of political engagement that unions helped initiate among its members is not being compensated for by the lethargic college students and non-union immigrant workers that helped elect Obama twice.  It's not a coincidence that one of the few endangered Democratic incumbents to survive one of these difficult midterm cycles was Senate Leader Harry Reid, who defied a flurry of polls showing him losing and pulled his 2010 Senate race out by a decisive five points.  What was Reid's secret?   Unions!  Nevada is one of the few states with ascendant ranks of union workers, and the SEIU rallied their troops with an impressive get out the vote machine.  If his Democratic colleagues in other states who got wiped out in 2010 and 2014 had unions working on their behalf--rather than crossing their fingers that college students and recent immigrants turn out in never-before-seen numbers every cycle--they might still be in the Senate today as Reid is.

Perhaps the best way of measuring the sustainability of the Democrats' union coalitions of old against its college students and immigrants coalition of today is places that have had both....meatpacking towns.  Up until the 1970s and 1980s, the meatpacking industry had one of the strongest unions in the country, and its workers were a reliable engine for Democratic votes cycle after cycle.  But a major union-busting initiative rocked the industry to its core and for the last quarter century, the industry has been largely nonunion and its workforce made up primarily by first-generation immigrants.  A quarter century after this transformation was completed and you'd still have a hard time finding a single meatpacking or food processing town in the entire country that is more Democratic in 2015 than it was in 1990.  Keep in mind that some of these cities were 90% white in 1990 but are majority minority in 2015, yet they're still less Democratic.   Perhaps another generation from now, when these majority minority towns are populated by the citizen children of the current immigrant workers, we'll finally see movement back towards the Democrats, but the exponential turnover rate of immigrant workers at meatpacking plants even makes that proposition iffy.

With all this context, it's especially terrifying to see what the Republicans have accomplished in the legislatures of battleground states across the country in the last several years, winning low turnout midterm elections promising they won't go after unions and then making union-busting their top priority once they win.  Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana were successful in imposing union-destroying right-to-work legislation in the last few years, Ohio tried it and failed (so far at least), while Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia are all poised to make the jump at the first opportunity.   And of the Governors and Legislatures who snuck through right-to-work legislation, all of them were rewarded with re-election, showing future Republican politicians that crucifying the opposition party's primary fund-raising and infrastructural engine is a consequence-free proposition.  Having seen this done at the state level so successfully, the Republican Party is patiently waiting to win the White House, be it in 2016 or 2020 or any cycle when the national tide inevitably turns their way, to ram through a national right-to-work law which would wipe out what's left of unions...and wipe out the Democratic Party's ability to compete in elections for a generation.

And yet here are the Democrats, whistling past graveyards every step of the way assuring themselves that it is THEY who have something resembling a permanent electoral advantage because of the rising tide of Hispanics and African-Americans.  I've long pontificated on my "Mississippi America" theory that whites will continue to get more Republican to compensate for rising numbers of minority, canceling out the advantage, but in the context of near-universal union busting perhaps even that theory is incomplete.  I submit that most nonwhite voters are "economy voters", aligning with the Democrats primarily because they're receptive to the Democrats' positions on jobs, the economy, and the safety net, and probably aren't all that moved by white liberals' obsession with free birth control, climate change, and gun control.   So if unions are finished off and their financial and infrastructural role in shaping the Democratic Party's message disappears, then what fills the vacuum?  If it isn't Richard Trumka behind the messaging of the Democratic Party, will its messaging be completely overtaken by Sandra Fluke, Tom Steyer, and Mike Bloomberg?  And most importantly, will working-class blacks and Hispanics, whom Democrats have mortgaged their party's future on permanent 80+% margins of victory from, be motivated to show up at the polls and support a Democratic Party that talks about climate change and gun control more than it talks about the economy?

White liberals' cocksure assertion of "demographics being destiny" doesn't hold up to any scrutiny, and is based entirely on two Presidential elections with a coalition that has only been dependable for one man, a man who will never be running for election again.  But its Republicans who are the playing the role of the sly tortoise in this race, quietly cutting the legs out from the Democrats' flimsy and unreliable would-be advantage while the Democrats nap thinking they've already won the race.  If there wasn't so much at stake, I would find some amusement at the extent the Republicans have the Democrats right where they want them.  But strong unions are imperative to any hope of middle-class preservation and equally as imperative to a political environment that isn't completely under the ownership of the financial industry.  If we lose unions, we lose not only an informed faction of the electorate motivated to activism to improve the country, but we lose any and all pushback against the bought-and-paid-for corporate agenda. 

One would think this would be easy for Democrats to understand....but they've got their head so high in the clouds regarding their inevitable continued support from the rising Hispanic population that they're not even trying to hear it.   Add the near destruction of unions to the current structural issues facing the Democrats, and it's clear that the Democratic Party's fortunes are worse today than any other time in the past century.  But I fear it won't be until the day the national right-to-work law gets signed by the next Republican President in his or her first 100 days in office that Democrats will begin to yearn for the comparative good old days of 1984 and 2004.  But I'm sure they'll still think "Hispanics will rally to save us in the next election...you just watch!"