In Democratic politics, the Service Employees International Union is a colossus. Not only does it have the ability to put thousands of volunteers on the ground in swing states, but in the wake of Citizens United, it has also shown a willingness to independently spend tens of millions of dollars on ads and voter outreach.
During the 2012 presidential election, the union spent nearly $70 million. This year, SEIU has again pledged to spend $70 million in support of Clinton and Democratic Senate candidates-much of that taking the form of attacking Donald Trump. Half of that mountain of money is going toward a multi-tiered voter-outreach campaign aimed at shoring up support and boosting turnout in communities of color.
"We believe communities of color and white women are difference-makers in some of these battlegrounds and we're doubling down on the engagement to turn them out," SEIU President Mary Kay Henry said in an interview at the union's headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The union is well positioned demographically to reach these types of voters. While many industrial and building trades unions have long been tied to the white male working class, the service-sector union is much more diverse-more than half of its members are black and Latino, and many of its health-care members are white women.
Its member diversity has also played a large role in shaping its political program, which goes beyond boosting workers' rights and pay, to a focus on racial justice and immigration reform. Its goal of creating a more intersectional program was part of the reason SEIU opted not to participate in the For Our Future super PAC operation that the other major labor groups-the two teachers unions, the American Federation of Federal, State, and Municipal Employees, and the labor federation AFL-CIO-formed in partnership with Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist and liberal benefactor.
SEIU wanted to start canvassing earlier, do more paid advertising directed at Latino and black voters, and coordinate with local advocacy groups in communities of color more aggressively than For Our Future was ready to do. "I just thought the best thing to do, since I work with those unions all the time on politics, was to say, 'Let's coordinate as we hit the ground,'" Henry says, which SEIU has done by divvying up terrain in states like Pennsylvania and Florida. "They have turf, we have turf. We know what vote we are trying to drive [to the polls] together."
The union is also coordinating some of its work in New Hampshire with Planned Parenthood's political operation; with Steyer's NextGen Climate in New Hampshire, Colorado, and Pennsylvania; and with a number of small local advocacy groups across the board.
SEIU's independent spending effort is concentrated in seven battleground states
-primarily Pennsylvania, Florida, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Colorado, and to a lesser degree, Ohio and Michigan-with a goal of canvassing more than one million doors three times over.
In Pennsylvania alone, they are targeting nearly 250,000 doors, primarily in the majority-black neighborhoods of West and North Philadelphia. In the critical swing state of Florida, the union has targeted more than 575,000 doors-three-quarters of them potential Latino voters-in Miami-Dade County and in the I-4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando, a critical stretch of political turf that has swung blue as demographics have shifted.
ON THE UPPER NORTH SIDE of Philadelphia on Monday afternoon last week, dozens of canvassers gathered in a makeshift campaign office before hitting the streets. Tucked into a nondescript strip mall, the office doesn't look like much, but it is one of the central hubs for SEIU's super PAC operation, which is orchestrating a large voter turnout effort aimed at putting Hillary Clinton in the White House and Democrats like Katie McGinty, who is challenging Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, in the Senate.
In Pennsylvania alone, the group has about 100 canvassers on the streets knocking on several thousand doors a day. Since setting up shop in June, the group has knocked on more than 400,000 doors and plans to return to 240,000 doors on Election Day alone.
On any given day, canvasser Sage Idokogi knocks on up to 70 doors, traversing Philadelphia's majority-black neighborhoods on the north side. He was knocking on doors in the city during Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and remembers there being palpable excitement to vote for the country's first black president. But excitement has diminished this election cycle. "People feel like they're against Trump more than anything, and are backing Hillary just to beat Trump," Idokogi says, adding that it makes these voter outreach efforts all the more important. "I'm more afraid of the people who aren't voting."
On that Monday afternoon, Idokogi was canvassing the Belfield neighborhood, a majority-black, heavily Democratic-voting area with little sympathy for the Republican nominee. Canvassers already made a first pass through to talk about Trump's policies and ask registered voters to sign a pledge to vote against Trump.
Now, they're gauging these voters' top issue concerns from a tailored agenda-wages and union rights; debt-free college; affordable child care; access to long-term care; the racism that plagues Black America; a path to citizenship; and clean air and water-and then contrasting Clinton and Trump on their top issue. They'll make additional sweeps of these voters in the days leading up to the election, in addition to a massive get-out-the-vote effort on November 8.
Wages and racial injustice are by far the most pressing concerns for the voters they've canvassed so far.
At one house Idokogi visited, a black man voiced his dismay about public safety and the city's police force. "It's almost up to us now" to keep the streets safe, he said. "I don't know what changed. I don't know if some of [the city's police officers] need to go to anger management, but they're taking it out on the streets."
Idokogi used this as an opportunity to outline Clinton's plan to invest $1 billion in police training programs that focus on implicit bias, community policing, and de-escalation-and then contrasted that with Trump's support for a national stop-and-frisk policy.
Chelsie Larose, a 17-year-old high school senior who moved to Philadelphia last year, first took a canvassing job with United We Can (as SEIU calls its independent-expenditure program) because she needed the money. She hadn't really paid much attention to politics before but as she began learning about the issues during her training and started actually talking with people on the doors, Larose began to see just how important this election is for her community. As she's knocked on doors, she's seen the anger at Trump's racist rhetoric and the discontent at an economic recovery that still hasn't reached their own neighborhood. "Hillary is at least trying to address the situation," Larose tells potential voters. "Trump is just bashing us, saying we have nothing to live for."
And while she won't be old enough to vote on November 8, she's doing her best to convince others to. "There are a lot of people who say, 'We don't want Trump,' but aren't voting," she says. "It's all about money and power. If you don't vote, you're giving that power to Trump."
JUST AS VALUABLE AS the millions of dollars SEIU is spending on paid canvassing and media, the union says, is the ability of its volunteer program to activate more members. In the final 40 days before the election, the union has intensified the recruitment of member-volunteers through its "Weekend Warrior" program. It's bused in members from solid blue states like New York and California to swing states like Pennsylvania and Nevada. Members in Oregon are phoning voters in Colorado, and SEIU has even brought some of its Canadian members to canvass voters in Minnesota and Michigan.
Every weekend, about 1,000 volunteer canvassers are walking precincts in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Florida. In Nevada, its member-volunteers are flooding into the neighborhoods of Las Vegas and Reno. On the weekend of September 10, the union had more than 8,000 volunteers knocking on doors. On the weekend of October 15, they had more than 5,000. By November 4, SEIU hopes to increase that number ten-fold, getting to 50,000 volunteers across the country during the campaign's final weekend-and hold that number through Election Day.
Regina Ellis, a registered nurse and member SEIU Nevada's Local 1107, is volunteering for her union's political program for the first time by talking with voters in Las Vegas about Clinton and U.S. Senate candidate Catherine Cortez-Masto. "I think it's really important to get out and talk with people because we're at a point that could change our lives. Not just mine; my family, my coworkers. Everyone," Ellis told the Prospect in an interview. "It's very important to get involved and feel like I've made some sort of impact."
THE COST OF THIS POLITICAL outreach is staggering. United We Can has received at least $11 million in funding so far, according to campaign-finance reports, with SEIU providing the lion's share, but that number will surely balloon as get-out-the-vote efforts dramatically ramp up in the next two weeks. In addition, SEIU has given $1 million to Priorities USA Action, the main pro-Clinton super PAC, as well as to other top Democratic PACs.
The massive investment makes sense considering how much the future of SEIU depends on the outcome of the 2016 elections.
As Buzzfeed News reported, the union has already presented its first demand for Clinton, should she become president
: pass a massive jobs bill that would also increase standards for workers in child care and home care-a rapidly growing sector in which the union is seeking to scale up its current membership of roughly 500,000 members.
Getting a worker-friendly Supreme Court justice on the bench would protect public-sector unions from legal attacks like Friedrichs v. CTA, which was all but sure to succeed until Justice Antonin Scalia's sudden death, and Harris v. Quinn, in which the Supreme Court in 2014 devastated SEIU's home health-care worker organizing work by ruling that non-members covered by collective-bargaining agreements were not required to pay agency fees.
Clinton's appointments to the National Labor Relations Board will also be crucial for the future of the Fight for 15's legal battle with McDonald's over whether the corporation is a "joint employer" of workers at its franchise locations. Those legal cases are currently working their way through the NLRB's regional offices to the board itself, and the outcome could influence whether SEIU can unionize workers in the fast-food industry.
Along with backing Clinton, the union is also trying to help the Democrats gain a Senate majority, which will likely be necessary to seat a worker-friendly Supreme Court justice and to pass any sort of immigration reform or infrastructure spending program.
Some on the left have criticized unions for spending huge sums of member dues on politics-instead of on worker organizing-when the Democrats they've worked to elect sometimes turn a cold shoulder once in office. But beyond the near-term goal of giving Democrats control of the White House and Senate, SEIU believes its political program will result in a more active membership base that can remain mobilized for fights-both national and local-in 2017, 2018, and beyond. "For us it's the through-line for building this more powerful movement to drive change both at work and in our lives and our communities," Henry says.
