How Democrats can start winning back workers
It's an uphill climb, but there are clear opportunities
Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Progress Report.
This is a very packed newsletter, so the only PSA today is that you should try to buy union-made food and ingredients for Thanksgiving if at all possible. To help you out, here’s a guidehttps://aflcio.org/union-thanksgiving to which brands use union labor.
OK, now to the news.
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1️⃣ The saga continues: Will Ohio ever have anything remotely resembling fair elections? After Republicans doomed the very popular anti-gerrymandering amendment with the most cynical and dishonest sabotage of a ballot amendment that I’ve ever seen, the answer seemed to be a clear-cut no.
But last week, activists were given the go-ahead to collect signatures for a broad voting rights amendment, and on Sunday, Gov. Mike DeWine signaled support for a redistricting amendment that would break the state up into compact, community-focused Iowa-style districts. His plan would give the legislature final say over the maps, so it could be a mirage of fairness, but perhaps worthy of a closer look.
2️⃣ A huge deal: A new bill filed in the New Mexico legislature would create a Medicaid public option, with buy-in capped at 5% of someone’s annual income. That is exponentially less than what someone would pay for COBRA coverage. While Medicaid often includes a limited list of providers, the more it’s adopted, the more likely it is to become universally accepted.
3️⃣ On the other hand…: Trump’s imminent return to the White House already has conservative healthcare advocates and some legislators licking their lips at the prospect of teaming with RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz to punish poor people.
During his first term, Trump’s HHS approved several applications to implement work requirements on Medicaid, but all but one of them was overturned by the Biden administration. Now, red states — including Missouri, where voters expanded the program — are looking likely to quickly apply for the work requirement waivers once again. Conservative activists in Montana, meanwhile, are gearing up for a push to become the first state to repeal its Medicaid expansion. The unwinding was never going to end with Covid aid.
4️⃣ Populisn’t: Mardi Gras came early for Louisiana Republicans, who just passed a series of gigantic tax cuts for wealthy residents and corporations. The cut will create a $1.3 billion budget shortfall, to paid for by a sales tax hike that will predominantly burden working and middle class people. The state now has a 3% flat tax, and Republicans plan on eventually eliminating the income tax altogether.
5️⃣ Good read: If you’re trying to figure out why things feel differently than they did after Trump won in 2016, this piece does a good job of putting that sense of dread and resignation into words.
Winning back workers starts now
Democrats have made a habit of engaging in a self-imposed struggle session after every national election, and some years, there’s enough ambiguity in the results to justify the cringe-worthy skirmishes in the media. This year, the only reason the conversation has stretched this long is that powerful people want to obfuscate the inconvenient explanation for why Democrats cratered with working class voters.
The percentages are ugly: Trump earned 46% of the union vote and 56% of voters who did not graduate college. He also won a far larger percentage of the vote in big liberal cities than anticipated. But percentages are also misleading, and the shifts look far more dramatic due to the huge number of Biden voters who stayed home this time.
These voters couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump, but were dissatisfied with the status quo and Harris’s defense of it. Instead leaning on populism to get these disaffected base voters back on board, the Harris campaign wooed Nikki Haley voters… by holding events with Liz Cheney that actually drove them away.
A slim majority of Democratic voters were into Cheney, but far more partisans were ready to be fired up by the economic populism that never really happened.
Just how many Democrats stayed home or defected due specifically to this approach isn’t yet known. But as the below indicates, populism would have convinced more base voters to stick around, and ironically, had a better shot of drawing Republicans.
To be fair, Harris did have a version of some of these policies in her platform, which was far more friendly to working people than Trump’s. But because there was no big overarching theme to her campaign other than “Trump is a dangerous jerk,” Harris lagged behind when it came to big ideas and issues. Say what you will about him — seriously, say whatever you want — but Trump enunciated his policies loud and clear.
He’s always graded on a curve, but Trump’s ideas got a lot of attention in part because they were easy to understand. Things like ending taxes on tips spoke to working people in a way that tax credits and insurance coverage premiums derived from percentages of income simply did not. A new poll from Blueprint found that, irony of ironies, Trump was seen as the candidate of substance this year.
So where does this all leave us?
Democrats are seen as establishment elites, with little cultural or economic empathy for working class people. Republicans, miraculously, are improving their standing with working people thanks to cultural right-wing media populists, Trump (🤷♂️), and the support he’s gotten from people like Teamsters President Sean O’Brien.
There are a few approaches that Democrats can take to remedying this existential problem. A big part of it has to do with candidate selection and the uber-wealthy conservative forces that they have allowed to manipulate their primaries. In 2022, AIPAC put gobs of money behind centrist Michigan Rep. Hailey Stevens in her battle against labor stalwart Rep. Andy Levin, and had that not happened, perhaps that state turns out a bit differently this year.
I’ll have more on efforts to change course on the increasingly upper-crust candidate recruitment process in an upcoming edition of the newsletter. Tonight, I want to focus on policy, the other important part of this equation.
Real, tangible changes on the state level
While Democrats will be fully out of power on the federal level, they do still have more than a dozen state government trifectas as well as control of two-thirds of the government in a handful of other states. There is a whole host of things that can be done in those states to shore up labor protections and enact sweeping benefits for working families, and Democrats must seize them with very obvious enthusiasm and more than a bit of combativeness.
First, even with a moderately worker-friendly Secretary of Labor on tap, it’s overwhelmingly likely that some combination of the courts, Congress, and Trump himself will roll back most of the protections that the NLRB extended to workers over the past few years. It’s already started happening, with judges knocking down a ban on captive audience meetings, expansion of the joint employer standard, and raising the salary threshold for “white collar” workers exempt from overtime. It’s also likely that enhanced enforcement of child labor laws will end.
Some states have enacted the captive audience ban, and there are also a few with higher overtime exemption thresholds, but for the most part, it’s been the federal government that’s handled labor enforcement. Every state with a trifecta should codify the NLRB actions, and make a huge deal out of it.
In Michigan, where I’m proud to say that I helped push Democrats to repeal the state’s decade-old “right to work” law, legislators are spending the last few weeks of the year locked in a battle over the fate of several additional worker-focused policies.
Advocates have resumed a push for a paid family leave policy, which was introduced in spring of 2023 but has yet to advance. With just weeks before Republicans take a one-seat majority in the House, it would be a marquee win to round out a strong session that enabled Michigan Democrats to defend a lot of tight seats this month.
The UAW, with 300,000 active and retired members in Michigan, just put out a statement calling on Democrats to take action during the lame duck session.
In the final days of the Democratic trifecta, we are calling on the legislature to show up and fight for working class people. Michigan’s lawmakers can fight for the working class or do the bidding of corporations and big donors, but they can’t do both. It’s time to pick a side.
We must go on offense for living wages, health care, retirement with dignity, and time with our families. We must defend against corporate greed and divide and conquer politics.
In the lame duck session, we are expecting action from our legislators, and we will be watching closely. Who stands with the working class on our core issues, and who stands with corporate interests?
They were compelled to do this because Michigan House Democratic caucus has been obnoxiously conservative this session, killing prescription drug price reform and keeping the paid family leave bill in limbo. It’s one of the most popular policies in the country, so not only should Michigan Democrats get on board with paid family leave, every other blue state should do so as well. Even California and New York have skimpy benefits. Expect a lot of action on that this year.
Back to Michigan, legislators are also looking at reducing protections in the new paid sick leave law and reinstating the measly tipped minimum wage before Michigan begins phasing in the long-awaited minimum wage increase.
Why, exactly, they would do that, especially after this past election, is truly beyond me. The only upside I can see is for retiring lawmakers who are looking for gigs as lobbyists for the Chamber of Commerce or Restaurant Association.
Democrats in Minnesota, who got even more done than Michigan over the past two years, are also about to lose their super-slim majority (though a split in the House, confirmed tonight, gives them a bit more wiggle room). The best bet for passing an increase to the minimum wage, which fell short in a push this spring, is in the December lame duck session. With a state minimum below $11, this should be a no-brainer for Democrats.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats hung on to their state House majority by the slimmest of margins, which means they’ll maintain the ability to introduce bills and force Republicans to vote against an increase from the bare $7.25 national minimum.
Depending on just how far the Trump administration takes the Project 2025 playbook, there may be a need for some states to codify labor protections that were once the domain of the federal government. Minnesota is one of two states where an old law still on the books has an overtime threshold higher than the 40 hours found in the FLSA, so bringing that in line — not to mention raising the pay threshold for exempt workers — would be a smart preemptive move.
Most blue states do not have “right to work laws,” but Colorado has a modified one on the books that requires a second union election to begin bargaining. It explicitly gives employers a second chance to union-bust, often prevents contract negotiations, and has made organizing much more difficult; one union official told me that they don’t even bother trying to organize major companies or giant workplaces.
The SEIU is leading a push on a bill that would repeal the law, and it’s likely to pass the legislature — the big question is whether Gov. Jared Polis, who vetoed a modest labor rights bill this year, is willing to sign off on it. If he has aspirations to run for president, the decision should be easy.
None of these things will flip many individual voters on their own, but put together, people will start to notice an improvement in their take home pay, freedom at work, and working conditions. While there have been some nice victories for workers in a few states, Democrats in many others have allowed lobbyists to gum up the works, water down, and even kill ultra-popular legislation.
They should be embracing the coalitions and unions that come to them for help, spending time with their members and then championing their causes. It takes more than showing up on a picket line for a photo opportunity for people to believe that you’re on their side. Going to battle for working people instead of managing them as an interest group is the only way you’ll get their votes.
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I hope that they gain that support back, I wish the white working class would stop falling for the Repugs' lies year after year!!!
Tim Walz for Head of DNC!