SEIU

They had been backing They had been backing Edwards. It’s symbolic good news for Obama, but likely comes too late for the union to add real muscle to his quest to win the Golden State on Tuesday. –Dana Goldstein

NBC’s Aswini Anburajan reports: If Rodney Woodill hadn’t received a call from his wife Tuesday night, asking him to come home because his two-week old baby was sick, Edwards might have never won the endorsement of New Hampshire Service Employees Association, part of the Service Employees International Union. Woodill, who represents 900 county and municipal […]

Chuck Todd says Edwards is going to get the nod from SEIU in Iowa this evening. While the dissected, state-by-state endorsements might take away from his support in other states, this is a key gain for his campaign. He gets the union’s on-the-ground action there, as well as some much-needed publicity and incentive for the […]

As Garance notes, SEIU has always upheld that they won’t endorse till late in the game. October is most often mentioned, though in 2004, they didn’t endorse until November. But this seems precisely backwards. Theoretically, SEIU should take either one of two tacks: They should endorse early, like August, and spend a number of months […]

EDWARDS WINS SEIU STRAW POLL. Leave it up to a blogger to spill the beans. As SEIU members predicted on Monday evening, John Edwards won the non-binding SEIU membership straw poll, according to a blog item posted by Robert Haaland, a political organizer for SEIU Local 790, on the group blog Left in SF. The […]

WHAT’S GOING ON, SEIU? The union definitely polled its members here in Washington, D.C. on Monday to ascertain their presidential pick. Ballots were handed out and deposited outside the auditorium doors. The buzz in the hall after the speeches was all Obama, although Edwards support ran deep. So why didn’t SEIU announce the straw poll […]

SEIU PRESIDENTIAL PLANS. This is in real-time, people. I’m on the SEIU’s press conference call to announce the outcome of their member straw poll here in D.C. on Monday. And it’s…nobody? SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger bragged about how the union successfully pushed every Democratic candidate toward universal health care. She said the SEIU executive board […]

SEIU MEMBERS PREDICT EDWARDS ENDORSEMENT. (Photos: SEIU members in John Edwards T-shirts provided by their SEIU locals. Washington, D.C., Sept. 17, 2007.) It’s hard sometimes in the heat of the moment to distinguish enthusiasm for a politician’s rousing speech from enthusiasm for the politician himself. So in the cool of the evening I headed out […]

EDWARDS ON POVERTY, IMMIGRATION, THE WAR AT SEIU. A key distinction emerges between John Edwards and Hillary Clinton; Hillary discussed the history of labor in terms of the creation of the middle class, Edwards portrays it as a fight against poverty: “The greatest anti-poverty movement in American history is the organized labor movement.” This is […]

HRC AT THE SEIU. Hillary’s goal today is to recast herself as a populist, despite organized labor’s skepticism of her husband’s trade policies and her own ties to corporate donors and advisers. “People say, ‘Well, when you’re president, will labor have a seat at the table?’ Labor built the table,” she says. To a great […]