President Joe Biden has often proclaimed that he is the most pro-union president in history, a declaration that Democrats often tied to his appeal to white working-class voters in the Midwest.
Now serving as the party’s standard-bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris is building her own coalition by mobilizing a more diverse and expansive labor force in a different part of the country.
Harris is tapping into the organizational strength of a network of union groups that have a significant membership of women and people of color in the Sun Belt, a battleground region Democrats are aiming to keep out of former President Donald Trump’s column this fall.
“There’s no one that can organize quite like labor,” Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said. “Having that powerhouse of an organizing machine in concert with our teams in all of our battleground states has been a really important effort that we’ve been building to date and will continue as we head into early vote and get-out-the-vote efforts.”
Workers with the Service Employees International Union, the Culinary Workers Union and the AFL-CIO, are among the groups who labor leaders say have become especially energized since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer. Hotel workers, health care workers, janitors, airport workers and security officers are among the employees these groups represent. The SEIU alone has more than two million members nationally, with some in Canada, and 60% of them are women and two-thirds are people of color, according to the group.
“It’s a special moment for our members, particularly when we think about women of color, who often feel unseen, who often feel undervalued, disrespected, demeaned,” said April Verrett, the president of the SEIU. “It really is a special moment where our members can see themselves reflected in a woman who has been their champion for a long time, being able to be the leader of this country.”
That appeal has the potential to give Harris a critical boost in the closing months of the campaign, providing her with a faithful army poised to connect with the kind of constituencies she is trying to reach, including low-propensity Latino and Black voters.
All together, labor leaders predict thousands of union members will deploy to battleground states to knock on doors or work phone banks. Large groups are expected to travel from blue states like California, Illinois and New York to crucial battlegrounds like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina.
Having workers vouch for Harris could help Democrats’ efforts to battle against Trump’s messaging on the economy, an issue where most polls show him with an edge as he’s seized on inflation and high costs.
In Flint, Mich., on Tuesday, Trump told supporters that the Biden administration had harmed the city’s thriving auto industry while putting some of the blame on the United Automobile Workers President Shawn Fain, who has endorsed Harris. Trump also promised a manufacturing boom under a future administration.
“The biggest beneficiary, I believe, is going to be your state, and I won’t say that to other states,” Trump said. “You are going to have plans to build at a level that you haven’t seen in 50 years.”
Verrett and Chavez Rodriguez pointed to Harris’ long track record with unions as a motivating factor among these workers. That includes the time she said she worked at McDonald’s when she was a student, her backing of an initiative targeting wage theft and illegal labor practices as California attorney general, and her introduction of legislation to protect workers against the harms of working in extreme heat as a U.S. senator.
“California labor takes an important new sort of position in this election, just given that it is the vice president’s home state, and she has such deep relationships with these labor unions, they’ve endorsed her throughout her career and almost every election that she’s run,” said Chavez Rodriguez. “Now we’re able to really mobilize that support and energy for someone as one of their own.”
Biden has long championed workers’ rights, becoming the first sitting president to join a picket line when he joined striking auto workers last year. And the excitement around Harris, and her history in California supporting unions, now puts her in a formidable position to mobilize labor in her campaign.
During her first run for president, Harris walked a picket line in 2019 with workers from General Motors outside of Reno, Nevada. That same year in Las Vegas, she marched with McDonald’s employees who were on strike asking for more pay.
The Harris campaign said canvassers would lay out to voters the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and its proposals to scale back union protections and reinstate Trump-era executive orders that curtailed the strength of public sector unions.
“Trump would be even more dangerous and more devastating for organized labor if he were to get a second term in the White House,” Chavez Rodriguez said. “The plans that are laid out in his Project 2025 are ones that would continue to attack workers’ rights to be able to organize, to be able to fight for the kinds of safety and protections and wages that they deserve.”
While Trump’s allies are some of the key architects of Project 2025, the former president has attempted to distance himself from the policies laid out in the 920-page policy blueprint.
Some unions Harris is seeking to make inroads with have significant Latino membership, which could help toward animating a key voting bloc Democrats have lost ground with in recent elections. That will be vital in the battleground state of Nevada, for example, where the Culinary Workers Union, where Latinos and people of color are well represented, is one of the most powerful organizations in the state.
Sen. Laphonza Butler of California said the conversations these workers take to their co-workers at casinos and hotels and later back to their communities carry significant weight.
“It will be determinative,” Butler said of the Sun Belt labor groups’ role in the November election. “I absolutely think it’s going to be an indispensable weapon.”
Harris will still face plenty of challenges in her effort to win over union voters. Last week, roughly 30,000 Boeing factory workers walked off the job after rejecting a contract. Trump has questioned Harris’ resume at McDonald’s, pointing to a report that noted Harris had not mentioned her work at the fast-food restaurant until she ran for president in 2019. And the powerful Teamsters Union, which backed Biden in 2020, has yet to endorse in this year’s presidential race.
Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt pointed to polling the Teamsters conducted showing that more of its members thought the union should endorse Trump than Harris.
“While union leadership has been fully entrenched in Democrat politics for decades, the workers who comprise unions are supporting President Trump because they have paid the price for Kamala’s failed economic policies over the past four years and know President Trump stood strong for the American worker during his first term in office by putting more money in their pockets, negotiating good trade deals around the world, and protecting their jobs here at home,” Leavitt said in a statement.
Jim McLaughlin, president of Arizona’s AFL-CIO and the United Food & Commercial Workers Local 99, noted a recent surge in “passion” among members to help take part in the election.
He said since Harris’ ascent, he has seen hundreds of volunteers step forward to take part in getting out the vote, and noted her improvement over Biden in the polls in Arizona.
He noted that when Biden was still in the race, polls showed Democrats in Arizona trailing beyond the margin of error. Now, Harris’ candidacy has moved Democrats to within a point or two.
“Arizona is going to be a state that, at the end of the day, will elect the president — President Harris — I truly believe that,” McLaughlin said. “Momentum will carry Vice President Harris and Governor [Tim] Walz through. And so I do think Arizona is going to play a big part in this election, and I think the momentum will be there to put her over the top.”
