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.
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 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 on social media 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.
