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Remember how previously, 58% of polled teamster union members had favored Trump?
Well, it turns out that the Harris campaign managed to convince almost 77% of the union members:
Of course, this is very likely not what happened. What likely happened is that subsections of the teamster union which represent a total of 1M members have endorsed Harris.
There are spins, and there are lies. This seems to be an outright lie. If you make a claim about a decision being made by n people, this means that there were n instances of a person making that decision. In reality, you have a decision made by a handful of people on behalf of 1M people. Even if Union membership contains a terrible clause where members grant their leadership to endorse candidates on their personal behalf (as in Leader: "Union Member J. Random has decided to endorse candidate X"), that arrangement would be so surprising that it should not be reported as "1M union members decided to endorse X". Then preferred phrasing given what we know of the polling tendencies would be "Union members who claim to speak for 1M members have endorsed X".
The alternative is to classify sentences like "In 1939, 80 million Germans decided to have the Wehrmacht invade Poland" as true. With this interpretation, the Nuremberg trials would have had a lot more defendants.
And for the Guardian it was not enough to uncritically repeat the claim by the Harris campaign, they even had to top it with that highly misleading statement that the union bosses had previously decided not to endorse a candidate. In that context, this would be parsed as "Despite being favored by 77% of the union members, Kamala Harris, champion of the people was not endorsed by evil MAGA-favoring union bosses who are out of touch with their base."
From what I have read on the motte, the better paraphrasing of the situation would be: "Due to a majority of their base favoring Trump, Democrat-leaning union executives declined to endorse any candidate rather than having to follow their members into endorsing Trump. Later, subgroups of the union representing 77% of the members decided to endorse Trump, likely contrary to the majority opinion of their bases."
I would not vote for Trump if I was an US citizen, but I find this behavior by the Harris campaign and the media disgusting.
Of course, that leaning on on the union bosses and then telling the lie about 1M endorsements is very unlikely to even matter at all. The only people who might care are the 14M union members, perhaps 10% of the voters. About 13M of them will not care very much whom some other union endorses. The 1.3M teamsters who might care a bit more will have a much clearer picture what is happening between base and leadership than I could ever have from the far side of the pond. "Hey, Bob, Joe, listen up. Our Union just decided that we and 999997 other Teamsters are in fact endorsing Harris, so take off your MAGA caps and vote for her."
I mean, it's an obvious lie that 77% of warehouse workers bothered to respond to a request for endorsement. But the claim 77% of the teamsters union supports Harris is, from a certain point of view, true, and that makes it a spin, not an outright lie.
Someone made a post here about how Trump lies vs how the establishment lies and this Guardian article typifies it. Technically true but extremely misleading and you can see in the twitter replies that some people seem to have been misled and now are calling for the president of the Teamsters to be removed because he is out of touch with the rank and file. A similar thing happened with the 51 intelligence agents claiming the Hunter Biden laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation. Again probably technically true but extremely misleading. For example even if some of the intelligence agents knew 100% that it was not a Russian intelligence operation they could still claim it had the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.
I don't know if its my post you're thinking of but i did just post about this very topic
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Bingo.
Trumps version of the same lie is something like "I've been told that the Teamsters like me a lot. They say over a million of them support me, can you believe that? Enthusiasm like you've never seen, the Teamsters are going to vote for Trump in massive numbers, just unbelievable numbers!"
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