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PAINT OUT THE VOTE  
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Luke Goldstein
November 5, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ The Painters Union has driven a bus through swing states trying to
turn out union members for Kamala Harris. It hasn’t been the
smoothest ride. _

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris tours
the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District Council
1M facilities, October 28, 2024, in Warren, Michigan., Paul Sancya/AP
Photo

 

PHILADELPHIA – Despite decades of declining union membership, it’s
not hard to see why Democrats hold labor close come election time,
especially during the get-out-the-vote period in battleground states.

In a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood, rows of modest one-story
homes with short lawns are home to union members, from city employees
to firefighters and construction workers.

A wiry man in blue jeans and a Phillies shirt opened up his front door
to greet the canvassers he’d spotted outside, by the minivan wrapped
in the logo of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades
(IUPAT).

He recognized the lead canvasser, Jimmy Williams. It turned out the
two had actually come up through the local trade apprenticeship
together decades back. They embraced and reminisced about the old days
and how much of a hard-ass their instructors had been, especially one
in particular whom the two referred to exclusively as “Fat Tony.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d make it through those five years. Remember
our other instructor who served in the military and acted like he was
preparing us for combat in Vietnam,” the man at the door said.

“Some days it was like we had to remind him we were supposed to be
learning trade skills, not pass a physical for the Marines,”
Williams said in between drags of a cigarette. He goes through about a
pack of American Spirits a day.

“Man, you should probably be [union] president by now with how
involved you were and your dad and all.”

Williams laughed. “Well, guess what I actually am. That’s why
I’m here.”

Jimmy Williams Jr., the international president of IUPAT since 2021,
is a fourth-generation union member and the son of former president
James Williams, who retired in 2013. After ascending through the ranks
from the shop floor, the younger Williams has built a reputation as
one of the more progressive union leaders, especially within the
building trades, which traditionally have leaned more conservative.

For the past six weeks, Williams and the Painters have been hitting
the road on a campaign bus tour through the Rust Belt, to rally
members and union households alike for the Harris-Walz ticket.
Northeast Philly was his last stop. He grew up just a few miles away
and has deep roots in the area. Along with the national ticket,
Williams was jointly canvassing that day for Jimmy Dillon, a
union-endorsed candidate for state legislature.

“One thing me and Jimmy have in common is that we were both dunked
on in high school by Kobe Bryant,” Williams said of the late Lakers
star and Philly native, who played at Lower Merion High School in the
suburbs.

This kind of familiarity with the backgrounds and daily struggles of
union voters, outside of politics, has become increasingly rare inside
the Democratic Party. It’s one of the main assets that someone like
Williams brings to the table during political campaigns.

Eventually, Williams got around to asking his fellow apprentice who he
was voting for.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m planning on voting alright.”

“Well, you’re voting for Harris, right?” Williams said after a
pause.

“Oh yeah, I’ll be voting Democrat,” he said, though his
hesitance made it sound more like he’d just decided there on the
spot.

Not all the contacts with voters went as smoothly. As Williams caught
up with his old buddy, another canvasser spoke on the other side of
the street to a firefighter with a Trump-Vance lawn sign next to one
for down-ballot Republican candidates.

He said he was voting for Trump because of immigration. He’d heard
that Democratic groups were “cutting $10,000 checks to hand out to
illegals once they got here.” When pressed on it, he said crime was
another issue he would be voting on.

A committed Republican is not the typical voter the Painters were
trying to reach at this late stage in the race. The outreach program
in Philadelphia is being coordinated through the broader AFL-CIO,
intended to knock on the doors of registered Democrats to make sure
they’re coming out to vote.

But the firefighter is indicative of Trump’s strong support among
many union workers, which IUPAT saw firsthand during their bus tour
across the blue-wall states.

PARTICIPATION IN A UNION DOES INCREASE the likelihood of someone
voting Democratic. But the party has continued to lose working-class
voters across the board, particularly men without a four-year college
degree. This reshuffling of the party’s appeal is magnified in the
building trades, which still skews demographically somewhat whiter and
more male. Latinos in some states are starting to make up a
significant share of the trades, a development reflected in the
Painters’ membership.

Even with political advocacy efforts by IUPAT leadership, they expect
roughly an even split among their members between Trump and Harris,
give or take ten percentage points on either side. The union
leadership has reason to believe that Democratic support has gone up
since Harris took over the ticket, which would be an outlier compared
to internal polling from other unions.

The margins in tight swing states like Pennsylvania could decide the
election. In 2020, Biden eked out a victory by making up some ground
with white working-class voters. “The backbone of the Democratic
Party and the middle class is the Philly building trades … we will
be a bellwether for the nation,” said Ryan Boyer, the business
manager of the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council,
at a rally held in the back of a local diner over the weekend with
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D).

Some union leaders like the Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien have looked at
Trump’s support among their rank and file and decided to sit this
election out on the sidelines. Williams has opted for a different
approach by hitting the pavement in battleground states to try and
persuade members who are still undecided that the Biden administration
has been, in his words, the most pro-labor of his lifetime.

Expand
[Goldstein-IUPAT for Harris 110524 2.jpg]
Nathan Morris/NurPhoto via AP

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks at a labor rally for the Harris-Walz
ticket in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, October 27, 2024.

Williams’s main sales pitch focuses on the Biden administration’s
legislative achievements, job creation strategies, and administrative
rulings making it easier for unions to organize. In particular, the
Painters have significantly benefited from the construction boom
spurred by public investment through the CHIPS Act, Inflation
Reduction Act, and bipartisan infrastructure law. In Philadelphia,
hundreds of jobs have been created for the Painters and other trades
for renovations at the city’s main airport, funded by the
infrastructure bill. A giant banner hanging at the site reminds
workers and fliers which party paid for these upgrades.

Williams is trying to make the case to workers that the booming demand
for construction jobs could dry up under a future Trump administration
if, for example, congressional Republicans repeal the CHIPS Act as
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) intimated
[[link removed]] last week. With a
Senate majority, Williams is prepared to pressure Democrats to bring
the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act to the floor and
suspend the filibuster to get it passed.

Union pension fund relief included in the American Rescue Plan is
another policy that Williams points to in his stump speech to workers.

Pensions are a particularly salient issue for unions, which might
explain the generational gap between Democrats and Republicans. Older
voters in the Painters Union are actually more firmly backing
Democrats, whereas younger men appear to be breaking for Trump at a
higher rate.

In some ways, this trend in the building trades is a microcosm for the
electorate overall. Republicans used to reliably win older votes, but
that’s recently started to change due to concerns about democracy,
older women remembering a time without legal abortion, and
Democrats’ protection of Social Security benefits. Brian Ford, an
IUPAT member with the local District 21, thinks it’s very simple.
“Older [union] members are looking toward their pension and want to
make sure it’s secure but younger guys don’t really think about
that stuff yet.”

By giving labor a seat at the table and walking a picket line, the
Biden administration in Williams’s view stands in stark contrast not
just to the Republican platform but also previous Democratic ones.
“If Obama had made the kinds of investments into workers that this
administration has, then we wouldn’t have Trump. I really believe
that,” Williams said. The economic plight after the Great Recession,
he argues, certainly left a vacuum for Trump to exploit through racial
resentment of immigrants and other minority groups.

THAT APPEAL HAS FIRMLY TAKEN HOLD among a sizable chunk of the rank
and file.

At many stops along the trip in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania,
Williams has put himself in far less friendly territory than the homes
in Northeast Philadelphia. A clip the team posted
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shows Williams getting into a shouting match with a Trump-supporting
member of the Carpenters in Pittsburgh, who yelled at Williams to stop
talking politics on the worksite. “Brother, take a walk. I get paid
to tell my members the truth,” Williams yells back at him. The
Painters are not shying away from the internal conflicts dividing
their members in this election.

These worksite visits became the main vehicle on the road trip for
Williams to get his message out, because the team found it to be more
effective. It allows him to speak directly to his members in one place
during their lunch breaks and have a longer conversation. The IUPAT
campaign team, mostly composed of the executive leadership, has also
done more traditional canvassing of union homes and made thousands of
phone calls along the way. In between stops on the road, _Curb Your
Enthusiasm_ has been the team’s go-to show on the campaign bus’s
TV to pass the time.

Across the members they’ve spoken to, some common threads stand out.
Everyone is struggling with the cost of living. Talking about
corporate greed does ring true for members as one cause of higher
costs in groceries, for example. Williams also says he’s found
success by connecting public investments into reshoring supply chains
as a consumer benefit, not just a jobs program. “People remember
what it was like in 2021 not being able to buy a car out on the market
because of the semiconductor shortage,” he said. “You just have to
jog their memory.”

Trump-curious members consistently raise concerns about high levels of
immigration driving down wages and leading to crime. Border policy
though is one area where the Painters’ leadership thinks they can
redirect the conversation to economic concerns. “We try to remind
them that the same people fearmongering about immigrants don’t want
you to pay attention to the fact that employers are the ones who
aren’t paying you better, not your fellow workers,” said Williams.

Other issues are trickier to navigate. The Painters have heard a lot
of anti-trans sentiment during canvassing conversations. They
attribute this mainly to recent ads from the Trump campaign, which has
tried to push the issue heavily in their final messaging in Michigan
and Wisconsin. Some commentators have raised skepticism about the
effectiveness of this approach, but it does seems to be reaching union
households, albeit ones that might have already been supporting Trump
in the first place.

Williams and the IUPAT leadership want to make the pitch as much as
possible about what happens in the workplace, where they believe the
Democratic ticket is best for workers’ priorities.

On the bus, Williams sometimes cast the election in borderline
existential terms. He worries about retaliation against labor groups
that don’t fall in line under a Trump administration. “A lot of
members just take for granted that the union will be fine and they can
vote on other issues they care about,” Williams said. “I don’t
think that’s the case this time around.”

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Luke Goldstein is a writing fellow at The American Prospect. He
previously worked as a reporter/research associate at the Open Markets
Institute and interned at Washington Monthly.

* Election 2024; Painters Union; Labor Unions; Economic Policy
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