This Time, Unions Mobilized the Troops

A resurgent labor movement took a page from the Christian conservatives’ playbook in its successful effort to mobilize the union vote in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Twenty-two percent of those who voted came from union households, a very high level, although precise figures from the 1994 midterm election were not available for comparison. The heavy union turnout was credited for providing a significant boost for some Democratic candidates.

Rather than running expensive television ads as they did in 1996, the unions put their money into a largely behind-the-scenes campaign, just as the Christian Coalition has for the last several years. Union members handed out leaflets at factory gates, walked precincts and ran phone banks. Labor’s message focused on pocketbook issues rather than scandal.

“Our focus was on one-to-one contact with individual union members and family members . . . reaching back to our roots to make this the year of the work site and the doorstep and the telephone,” AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney said.

“If we could do this, we knew we’d . . . begin to reengage ordinary working Americans who had come to believe that politics had nothing to do with them, people who didn’t vote in 1994.”

Gray Davis and Barbara Boxer in California were among the Democratic candidates who benefited from the union turnout.

Seventy percent of the voters from union households said they voted Democratic, according to the Voter News Service, which takes highly respected exit polls. About 46% of the nation’s union membership turned out to vote, in contrast to only 36% of the total voting age population, according to AFL-CIO surveys.

“The major part of our program was turning out union votes,” said Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL. “The bottom line was you had an electorate where almost a quarter of the voters came from union households, and we don’t represent a quarter of the public . . . that is an extraordinary accomplishment for our people.

Where unions were weak, as they are in Southern states, they leveraged their influence by helping to sponsor get-out-the-vote drives in minority and Latino communities.

“We had a huge turn-out-the-vote effort aimed at African American and Latino communities, we opened up storefronts, got coordinators on the ground, set up phone banks, walked door to door . . . and on top of that we had a radio campaign on African American and Latino radio stations,” said Rosenthal, adding that while labor had made similar efforts in the past, this one was larger. They focused their efforts in 40 congressional districts.

Coupled with a slightly lower turnout among conservatives and with some conservatives actually voting for Democrats, the grass-roots union activity made a remarkable difference in races well beyond California. There were also victories in North Carolina, Nevada, Iowa and Washington state.

“The [Democratic] base was tremendous,” acknowledged Rep. John Linder of Georgia, who heads the National Republican Congressional Committee, which raises money for congressional candidates. “This year they said they were going to do it in turnout . . . and they were right.”

In California, the key to labor’s success was early organization. Many rank-and-file union members had been energized by the fight last spring to defeat Proposition 226 that would have banned the use of union dues for political purposes.

” . . . It created the momentum to do what we did on election day,” said Art Guzman, an air-conditioning mechanic who is a member of Local 250 in Los Angeles and was active in both efforts.

A prime example of the role unions played was evident in Democratic challenger Dennis Moore’s race against incumbent Rep. Vince Snowbarger (R-Kan.). Moore, the first Democrat in 38 years to win the Kansas City-area seat, got substantial campaign help from unions that allowed him to focus his $1-million campaign war chest on buying media.

“They followed through all the way,” said University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis, noting that at 6:15 on election night union activists were still at the phones making calls to members who had not yet voted.

In another not-so-subtle imitation of the political tactics of the Christian Right, the unions also kicked off an ambitious effort to get union members to run for political office. The program, whose goal is to get 2,000 union members on the ballot in 2000, got about 600 union members to run for office this year and in the majority of those races, they were successful, said Rosenthal. But even more important, it created enthusiasm for going to the polls in districts where union members were running.