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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15093 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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The realignment continues..

Here's a history of Teamster union endorsements over the last few election cycles.

2000: Gore

2004: Kerry

2008: Obama

2012: Obama

2016: Clinton

2020: Biden

2024: No one

That's right, the Teamsters aren't endorsing anyone. I think we all know what this means. But just in case you need a hint, the Teamsters themselves are here to tell us.

In the past week, following the Democratic National Convention and recent Presidential debate, the Teamsters commissioned independent polling firm Lake Research Partners to conduct the union’s final national survey. In the poll ending Sept. 15, Teamsters selected Trump by 58 percent for endorsement over 31 percent for Harris.

Here's the crazy bit. When they did the same poll just three months ago

From April 9-July 3, nearly 300 Teamsters local unions nationwide conducted first-of-their-kind Presidential town halls, soliciting endorsement preferences from members via straw polls. The in-person voting was held prior to Biden’s withdrawal from the race. The Teamsters’ polling data shows members backed Biden** 44.3 percent to Trump’s 36.3 percent.

What can explain this 35 point swing in Trump's favor over just a couple months? I can think there a couple possible explanations. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

  1. Biden grew up working class and can relate to these people where as Harris cannot.

  2. The original poll was conducted in person. The second poll was not. Presumably the first poll was a "show of hands" type of affair where people felt social pressure to vote the way the leaders wanted.

Whatever happened, this is a shocking result. Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold and that Dick Cheney would somehow still be alive and also a Democrat? Wild times.

Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold

The Teamsters have never been a reliable left-wing force - per Wikipedia they endorsed Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr.

For a shift that large in internal polling within a union that isn't consistent with nationwide trends (which show a very small shift in favour of Dems after the obviously senile candidate is switched out), I would assume that there is a Teamsters-specific issue that the rest of us are not aware of - probably related to how trucking is regulated. Some of it will be youth sex polarisation, but not much given the average age of the Teamsters membership.

The teamsters have most of their membership in warehouses IIRC. I think a lot of it is just working class voters favoring Trump even when they’re making good money.

Who would have imagined 20 years ago that a Republican candidate would be running on a platform that promised to upend the entire American economic system in order to protect union manufacturing jobs?

What we're seeing here is consistently the UAW votes for the candidate with a dumber economic platform, that wants to avoid free markets and engage in protectionism and subsidy to preserve high paying union jobs.

Trump, in the last few months, has pushed his promises of tariffs to ever more absurd heights. Vance has publicly said that there's no price for a toaster that is so high it is worth even one American factory job to lower tariffs.

I buy a lot of MiUSA stuff whenever I can, but there's no question that a shift to MiUSA stuff is going to represent a massive increase in consumer prices for most goods, especially if it happens all at once as a result of tariffs.

Whatever happened, this is a shocking result. Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold and that Dick Cheney would somehow still be alive and also a Democrat? Wild times.

This is less surprising than you think. 20 years ago is 2004. Dick Cheney's daughter was already a lesbian (and gay politics was clearly rising) and Democrats were solidifying as the anti-Iraq party (notably Afghanistan was not demonized, not the insertion of ourselves into the Houthi conflict), had repudiated the Clinton welfare reforms, and had Obama as the star speaker at their convention. We were on a trajectory to one party clearly being against your average white guy, and the other winning most white guys. If anything, unions have been slow to embrace the fact that Democrats largely have assembled a coalition that rejects being a normal working person.

And then, of course, there is the gay stuff.

Dick Cheney's daughter was already a lesbian

This is ancient history, but I seem to recall her being thrown under the bus by her father and sister. This doesn't make it "less surprising" for me, the progressive reverence for the Cheney family is whiplash inducing.

The Democrats heel turn to becoming the pro-war party is still surprising, right?

Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold and that Dick Cheney would somehow still be alive and also a Democrat?

This universe/timeline is clearly a simulation programmed by Hlinka, Instapundit, and the ghost of Tom Wolfe. The rest of us are just living in it. ;-)

It's not really that much of a twist to me that no college education men continue to break for Trump even in the context of a union.

As for the town halls, I don't know how much to credit them. Town halls and "popular assemblies" are easy to pack and direct, and I assume union leadership would have directed them towards Biden.

What makes no college men in particular such Trump supporters?

What Nybbler said is likely the proximate cause, but the deeper issue is that in an increasingly globalized economy, America’s comparative advantage shifts away from physical manufacturing and resource extraction (which is the domain of no college men) and towards finance, technology, and intellectual property (which is the domain of educated professionals). This leads to a general resentment against “the system”, which Trump offers in bulk.

The Democrats offer them nothing but scorn.

To me, the more interesting question is how 44% gets an endorsement, but 58% gets no endorsement.

I have never been a union member. My only experiences interacting with unions have been profoundly negative. As such, I am unqualified to make any suppositions about why the leadership would act in such a way.

Is there anyone here who could speak to the culture and explain it?

Leadership wants to endorse Harris. It is almost certainly that simple.

In this case Trump talked about firing workers who strike. Which is a pretty big issue for a union. And the union leader was very vocally unhappy about that. Without that he probably gets the endorsement, given the Union leader spoke at the RNC and the majority of members liking Trump.

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