"Newshour" Story on UAW Clarifies Why Trump Can Win

Earlier this month, "PBS Newshour" did a Labor Day feature profiling the United Auto Workers and Trump's "surprising strength" with their members.  I went into the story not expecting to learn anything new beyond the usual anecdotal man-on-the-street chatter.  In some ways, that's what I got, but the relative consensus of Trump competitiveness was striking even amongst the people that Trump's party has so openly treated as their enemies.  

Much of the interview was spent talking to a UAW member who was a Trump supporter and, when asked what share of the UAW membership he believed was going for Trump, his response was "70%...and that's being conservative".  Strikingly, when a pro-Harris union leader was asked the same question, the best he could come up with to counter it was "that the number was closer to 40%".  The third party who broke the tie was a long-time Detroit journalist who opined that the real number of UAW Trump support was "likely somewhere between those two guesses".  In other words, at least half of UAW members are supporting the Republican nominee for President in 2024.

Now, if you'd told me that more than half of Teamsters were supporting Trump this year, I wouldn't be surprised.  That was reinforced this week when the Teamsters President refused to endorse a candidate and risk alienating the decisive majority of his members who wouldn't have been onboard with a Harris endorsement.  Likewise, if you'd told me that a majority of members of the pipefitters' union were Trumpers, I also wouldn't have blinked.  But the UAW is a different beast entirely.  

The only reason the UAW continues to exist in 2024 is because Barack Obama bailed out the U.S. auto industry during the financial crisis when Republicans loudly, passionately, and unanimously called for burning the industry to the ground with the primary objective of wiping the UAW off the face of the Earth and sending its members to hell during the inferno.  The political party that shamelessly advocated for the UAW's annihilation 15 short years ago now likely has the support of more than half of its members.

More recently, UAW leader Shawn Fain led a ballsy and surprisingly successful negotiation during last year's strike and got the majority of what they wanted with the public support of President Joe Biden.  It seemed like the perfect formula to at least consolidate UAW member support and put the Democrats on track for a decisive victory in Michigan.  But even this very recent reminder to UAW members of who their friends are appears insufficient to keep most of the members from voting for those who gleefully plan to exterminate them, and have been not been bashful in sharing their desire to exterminate them for at least a generation.

My instinct is to chalk this derangement up to either the overarching supremacy of culture war politics or the abhorrently short memories of a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately populace, but particularly as it applies to Trump, I think there's more going on here.  The original sin in the Rust Belt was the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement.  Its legacy of ruin and rage in factory towns throughout Middle America resonates more than the legacy of Obama's bailout.  The disaster that would have been in 2009 doesn't register the same way that the disaster that was in 1994.  

There has long been an opening for any politician of either party who was openly critical of NAFTA, and Donald Trump sagely filled that void in 2015.  The union members who held their noses and voted for another generation for the party whose President brought NAFTA to their doorstep didn't hesitate for a second to abandon them once somebody came onto the scene vowing to renegotiate the agreement.  The fact that Trump followed through with that unlikely campaign promise was the shrewdest moment of his first term, even if direct results aren't necessarily tangible.

I still think it's delusional for UAW members to think their future is brighter with a Republican administration than a Democratic administration, but it would appear that that's where we are.  Those of us concerned back in the mid-90s that a Democratic President signing NAFTA would realign American politics have certainly been vindicated, even if that realignment took longer to fully materialize than expected.  A Democratic Presidential nominee could very easily lose the 2024 election because of something her predecessor did more than 30 years earlier.