Pennsylvania Democrats push to counter Trump’s growing rise with union workers

ALLENTOWN, Pennsylvania (CNN) — Bushy-bearded United Auto Workers leader Dan Vicente has watched first-hand as his fellow union workers have drifted away from the Democratic Party here in Pennsylvania.

He was almost one of them.

The plain-spoken UAW Region 9 director told a bustling hall on Sunday that he nearly voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Now, two elections later, Vicente said he’s still “not super into” either party but is backing Kamala Harris because she “at least comes from the working class.”

But he worries that Trump is still the one breaking through in many union shops like his.

“Let’s be real, a huge number of our unionized members are going to vote for Trump,” Vicente told CNN at the pro-Democrat rally. “The national Dems have a real problem with messaging to regular working people. You can give all the policy speeches you want. Nobody’s listening.”

The labor leader’s warning is yet another alarm bell for Democrats about their clout with labor nationally, which has been slipping for decades, according to interviews with more than a dozen union workers and local Democrats. Trump’s strength in places like eastern Pennsylvania have made it a far more urgent problem for Harris, whose ability to win the White House could come down to a few thousand votes here in the state.

It’s a challenge, too, for down-ballot Democrats in the Rust Belt. But in interviews, many labor leaders said the national party could learn from labor stalwarts here who are working hard to buck the trend, like Sen. Bob Casey and Reps. Susan Wild in the Lehigh Valley and Matt Cartwright in Scranton. For years, they’ve gone to the factory plants, gone to the picnics and gone to the picket lines.

That’s why Wild — who holds a critical toss-up seat in Democrats’ battle to flip the House — sat on stage Sunday morning alongside the UAW leaders. The room was filled with volunteer door-knockers and organized in support of Wild and Harris.

“Democratic candidates, at least on the presidential level, aren’t nearly as good at showing up for labor and getting to know them. And that’s what they want,” Wild told CNN. When asked how Harris and the Democratic Party can fix that, she said: “You gotta show up and you gotta get shit done.” But, she added, it’s much harder with only a 100-day campaign.

Harris, too, has been showing up at union events from Pittsburgh to Lansing, Michigan, in her 100-day sprint as Democratic nominee.

But while Scranton-born Joe Biden calls himself the most pro-union president ever, Harris’s support for labor has sometimes gotten lost in the broader messaging of her campaign. A September Fox News poll found Harris leading Trump among likely voters in union households, but by a smaller margin than Biden eventually won among that group in 2020.

The Democratic presidential nominee has also racked up endorsements from many of the biggest union groups, from the United Steelworkers to Pennsylvania’s own chapter of the Teamsters. But Harris failed to win an endorsement from the powerful national Teamsters group, as well as the International Association of Fire Fighters, when both declined to endorse in the presidential race.

And it’s tougher to reach those beyond the leadership table.

“The ones you really need to get to are the rank-and-file members,” Wild said.

‘They really need to trust you’

When Wild, the three-term House Democrat, showed up to a local firehouse last week to speak with members of the Carpenters Union Local #167, the mostly male crowd initially seemed skeptical.

She knew what issue was on their mind — immigration — and she decided to bring it up directly. She talked about how Capitol Hill Republicans, egged on by Trump, killed a bipartisan border security bill. And she talked about how Trump’s rhetoric, which she described as focusing on “rapists and murders and fentanyl” belied the truth of most migrants’ stories, who, she said, were more likely to join a union than to take a union worker’s job.

“A lot of these guys are not registered Democrats. So they really need to trust you,” Wild told CNN.

Harris is making a pro-labor pitch a big part of her closing message to voters. In speeches, ads and interviews, she’s calling out Trump for auto factory closures during his time in office and tax incentives for companies to move jobs overseas.

Gregg Potter, the president of the Lehigh Valley Labor Council, said he’s seen the Democratic Party sometimes takes union votes for granted. But he is fully on board with Harris and said: “I believe that she’s learning what’s important to us.”

“I did not know of her record that much, so I delved into it. She is the real deal,” said Potter, who showed up at the Allentown canvassing rally in a Harris-Walz t-shirt. “It took a couple weeks, but I’m firmly there.”

Potter added, though, “People say, well unions are all Democrat. Well, hardly the case.”

“It’s split,” he said.

Democrats struggle to break through

Thirteen days before the election, the highways of eastern Pennsylvania were dotted with highlighter-yellow Harris billboards. Each massive sign touts a different economic policy, from raising the minimum wage to protecting Social Security.

Along those same roadways, Trump’s own signs offer a simpler message: “DONALD TRUMP, LOWER TAXES. KAMALA HARRIS, HIGHER TAXES.”

Democrats insist it’s their agenda — not the GOP’s — that actually benefits the working class. But they also acknowledge they still struggle to pierce through Trump’s real-talking rhetoric.

Recently, though, Trump and his GOP allies have handed the Democrats a convenient new talking point: A video clip of Trump promising tax cuts for supporters, even as he jokes that they are already “rich as hell.”

In one ad that airs constantly here, an Allentown UAW member shakes his head as he watches Trump’s “rich as hell” remarks and says he plans to vote for Harris. (That member, Buddy Maxwell Jr., was among the canvassers on Sunday, and he told CNN that several people have approached him to tell him he helped sway their votes for Harris.)

Still, Democrats are clear-eyed that they won’t win the working class vote in Pennsylvania, especially among White voters. Instead, their strategy is this: Lose by less.

“Margins matter,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle, a southeastern Pennsylvania Democrat. He said Biden was able to win the state in 2020 because he improved “marginally” among these voters compared to Hillary Clinton.

“A Democratic nominee doesn’t need to win them. A Democratic nominee still needs to get a significant amount of the vote,” he told CNN.

Republicans, meanwhile, are working to make sure that doesn’t happen. Trump, for instance, won over a local steelworker’s union. And some Republican candidates here are taking pro-labor positions that would have been unusual to see from the GOP of previous decades.

“I’m the kind of candidate that can resonate on inflation and the economy and I can still be pro-collective bargaining,” said GOP candidate Rob Bresnahan, who is challenging long-time Rep. Matt Cartwright in Biden’s birthplace of Scranton.

But there’s another hugely important voting bloc among union workers that is giving Democrats hope in Pennsylvania and elsewhere: Women.

On a recent sunny Sunday morning, a pair of union leaders — Angela Ferritto, president of Pennsylvania’s AFL-CIO, and Jim Hutchinson, UAW Local 644 president — knocked on nearly a dozen doors before arriving at the home of Cindy and Cheyenne Lazarus.

And those two women are exactly the kind of voters that makes them believe Harris and Democrats can win in November.

Cheyenne, who is in her twenties, answered the door in a pro-Harris “Childless Cat Ladies Social Club” t-shirt. Both she and her mom, Cindy, a SEIU union worker at an Allentown retirement community, had already voted early for Wild, Casey and Harris.

“I’ve been known to split my ticket, but not in the last 12 years though, because Republicans are — crazy. I won’t say the word that I was thinking,” Cindy quipped. “They’ve just gone crazy.”

“I couldn’t wait to put that dark circle in front of a woman’s name,” she said about filing in her early ballot. “I was waiting for it for a long time.”

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