After historic speech by Teamsters president at RNC, it’s clear Democrats no longer have a hold on labour vote

During a daytime labour council meeting at the Democratic National Convention, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders stood at the podium, booming against Donald Trump in his typically blunt manner: explaining how he had eroded democracy, divided the country and sold out the working class.

Then, Sanders got quiet.

“When you’re a phony and a fraud billionaire like Donald Trump, why is it — now here is the hard question, and don’t slump it off,” he told the crowd. “How come a majority of working class people are supporting him?”

It’s an uncomfortable question that the Democratic Party, which has traditionally held the support of organized labour, has had to grapple with in recent years. 

Various polling shows that Republicans are leading Democrats with white, working class voters without a college degree, including a New York Times/Siena poll released in April, before Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. 

Harris is now trying to regain some of the ground lost by the current president, as Trump and the Republican Party continue to court voters from working class and union households.

And while Democrats still have the majority support of union voters, a Pew Research poll from last year found that almost 40 per cent of registered voters who are in a union are Republicans.

“The labour vote is huge in this election,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told CBC News.

But, she said, “labour leaders are not monolithic. We do not have magic wands. Frankly, our unions are really democratic.”

Some of those tensions have played out on convention stages. Harris received endorsements from a number of labour leaders on the first night of the Democratic convention, all of whom upheld her as a champion of the working class. 

But just last month, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien gave an eyebrow-raising speech at the Republican convention, making an appeal to the party to support labour and calling Trump a “tough SOB” for surviving an assassination attempt. O’Brien then thanked Trump for opening the convention doors to a union president.