I spent Sunday with the American labor movement (and a somewhat balky laptop, which is why you're reading this on Monday) gathered here in Denver and with union leaders who have major differences with one another but who are scared to death that John McCain may win this thing and who are mounting the most important of the ground campaigns on Barack Obama’s behalf. Their target is white working-class voters in battleground states -- the group that will determine the outcome of November’s election and that no other group on the Democratic side is really targeting.
Labor has always been able to put up good numbers when you compare the voting habits of their members to their non-union counterparts. The gap in presidential voting between working-class white union members and non-members is usually between 20 percent and 30 percent, and Mike Podhorzer, the AFL-CIO’s deputy political director, told a press conference on labor’s political program that the polling shows a similar gap this year. In the 2006 House election, white male union members voted for Democratic candidates by a margin of 39 percent. White male non-unionists voted for Republicans by a margin of 9 percent.
But there are two major problems. First, as a share of the overall population, labor continues to decline. Second, a lot of union members -- in such Appalachian swing states as Pennsylvania and Ohio (and among Michigan's transplanted hillbilly autoworkers) -- have never voted for an African American before and are not convinced that this year is the time to start.
