A New Campaign to Win Back the Industrial Midwest

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Yesterday, the AFL-CIO, to no one’s surprise, formally endorsed Joe Biden for president. By now, virtually every individual international union has endorsed Biden, too.

Which would be massively to Biden’s advantage if organized labor still constituted 35 percent of the American workforce, as it did in the distant days of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. Unfortunately, labor today comprises just a tenth of the labor force, and only six and a half percent of workers in the private sector.

Steve Rosenthal, who revitalized the AFL-CIO’s electoral operation when incoming president John Sweeney made him the Federation’s political director in 1995, has long pondered how to deal with this dilemma. “Right after 2016, when Clinton lost the blue-wall states in the Midwest, I thought about what we could do—short of getting the two million former union members in those states back into unions, which was unlikely.”

What Rosenthal has come up with in his current capacity as a political consultant to unions is a project called Union 2020. Six major unions—the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and the Teamsters—matched their current membership files to their files ten years ago, and came up with 480,000 former members who currently live in four key Midwestern swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

“We now have half a million former members we can communicate with on the election,” Rosenthal says. “And just because they’re no longer members doesn’t mean they’re necessarily anti-union.”

Using the kind of advanced analytics that have become a hallmark of 21st-century campaigns, Rosenthal also came up with 4.5 million additional voters in those four states who, while not members, have favorable attitudes toward unions. These voters are largely centrist in their policies; they score between 30 percent and 80 percent on the partisanship spectrum. In both groups—the former members and the larger population—unions have a 70 percent approval rating.

If the Midwest swings back to the Democrats this fall, this campaign targeting workers and workers’ issues may be a big part of the reason why.

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