Paul Sancya/AP Photo
At a campaign rally supporting Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, October 22, 2024, in Detroit
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
DETROIT – Leslie Thacker is used to hard work as the head cleaner at a public school. But since June, she’s traded cleaning gloves for clipboards to canvass voters across Michigan’s largest city, sometimes talking to voters for as many as ten hours a day. The work is necessary, she said, because the presidential election “will affect our kids, our grandkids—our great-grandkids.”
Thacker has reason to focus on the future: As the matriarch of a large family, she has 29 grandchildren, as well as three “greats,” as she calls them.
Her message to the Detroiters whose doors she knocks on is that they should be concerned about the future, too. But for the past several months, she’s learned that it’s taken real effort to get voters to the same level of focus that she has. “A lot of us are uninformed,” she said, because they “are more focused on their day-to-day living” than national politics.
Thacker is one of many Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members, representing a key segment of organized labor that is growing more female and less white, who are targeting working-class voters of color who are less likely to vote in the days leading up to the presidential election. In Detroit, one of the poorest major cities in the country, canvassers need to convey that a vote for Kamala Harris could actually make a meaningful difference in their lives.
The SEIU canvassing program is part of a long history of unions working to impact presidential elections. Unions “help working-class people get out the vote,” said Roland Zullo, research scientist at the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work, who has published extensively on labor issues. Because unions “underscore the importance of voting and educate members on why it’s important,” Zullo said, “one of the big effects unions have on politics and our society in general is they help make democracy work.”
Other union campaigns this year include canvasses from the hotel workers at UNITE HERE, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, the United Auto Workers, and a coalition of public employee unions. According to remarks from AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler in a press call on October 17, unions in its federation planned to contact approximately 6.5 million households in battleground states before Election Day.
SEIU, which is not part of the AFL-CIO, is specifically focused on mobilizing working-class voters—and not just those who are members of the union. It has committed a record $200 million—the union’s largest investment in election spending in history—to get out the vote among its two million members, plus six million working-class voters in battleground states. According to SEIU, its strategy increased turnout among voters the union contacted during the 2022 cycle by 27 percent.
Megan Piccirillo
SEIU members Mary McClendon, left, and Leslie Thacker
The challenge may be less about swaying working-class voters away from Trump and more about encouraging them to cast their ballots in the first place. In Detroit, turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, but still only a little over half of registered voters actually turned out to vote. Given the potential for higher turnout, working-class voters can have wide impacts on elections. In Michigan statewide, roughly 73 percent of voters with household income below $50,000 voted in the 2020 election, according to a study by the Poor People’s Campaign, helping to contribute to Biden taking the state by roughly 154,000 votes.
According to R. Khari Brown, a sociology professor at Wayne State University, the main issue is “the utility of voting” for inconsistent voters. Brown said that the influence of money in politics results in working-class people having little say in government, pointing to research showing that wealthy people and business interests largely set the U.S. policy agenda. For example, a 2014 study published in Perspectives on Politics found that the top 10 percent of earners and business interest groups help determine government policy, while the opinions of average Americans had “a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact” on policy.
Working-class voters may wonder, Brown said: “Does my quality of life change at all if I submit a ballot? Is it worth my time?”
It’s no surprise, then, that discussions of tangible benefits stick in people’s minds. Some Detroiters have told Thacker they are undecided or considering voting for Trump because he was responsible for their stimulus checks during the pandemic.
Mary McClendon, a nursing home worker and SEIU member in Detroit, often hears the same thing. She asks people, “Did Trump give it to you or was it Congress? Was Trump just taking the credit for it?”
In September, McClendon asked one young man who planned to vote for Trump because of the stimulus payments, “Of that [money] that Trump supposedly gave to you, how much do you have now?” She pressed him and listed off Project 2025 objectives until he said he was changing his vote.
A month later, the man called her and said he and his sister were both voting for Harris.
Thacker thinks Harris would better prioritize the rising cost of living than Trump, and that SEIU canvassers with the personal experience of struggling to manage their day-to-day budget can speak well to those concerns. People, for instance, are worried about the housing market—and so is Thacker. “It’s a lot of families doubling up here,” Thacker said of Detroit, adding that Thacker is helping to raise her great-grandchildren because one of her granddaughters can’t find housing. The cost of rent, she said, has become “ridiculous.”
These are classic bread-and-butter issues, just made personal.
“If you are encouraging people to vote for the sake of voting, that’s a tougher sell for people [who] are inconsistent voters,” Brown said. But, he added, “If SEIU can make the connection between voting, to pushing candidates once elected to address issues of working-class people, that’s a winning strategy,” he said.
Tinitco Moore, a personal care assistant at a hospital in Muskegon, Michigan, and an SEIU canvasser, seems to be motivated by that very approach. Moore is canvassing for Harris so that once elected she can “deliver on her promises,” she said.
“The work really begins after she gets in.”
