Winning the Rank-and-File Vote
A look at recent bottom-up efforts to win endorsements for Bernie Sanders and mobilize trade unionists against Donald Trump offer insights into how the labor movement can better and more democratically engage its members in politics.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during a "Brunch with Bernie" campaign rally at the National Nurses United offices on August 10, 2015, in Oakland, California. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Every four years, like clockwork, our two major parties serve up presidential candidates whose commitment to the cause of labor is more rhetorical than real.
This is most obviously true of conservative Republican courting of working-class voters. That venerable bait-and-switch routine reached its twenty-first-century apex in the form of Donald Trump’s successful faux-populist campaigns for the White House in 2016 and 2024. Postelection, his first and now second administration quickly displayed little interest in helping anyone other than Trump’s own billionaire-class supporters.
Democratic contenders for the White House tend to disappoint as well, under the influence of similar wealthy donors — despite their party’s pro-labor platform on paper, better overall track record, and partial reliance on union funding.
Consider for example the issue of private-sector labor law reform. It was nominally backed by Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden during their respective presidential campaigns over the last half-century. Once in office, not one of these Democrats, with the exception of Carter, got anywhere close to strengthening the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) via legislation. All of them did improve labor law enforcement through better NLRB appointments, administrative rulemaking, and case-by-case decisions, with the Biden administration being best at all three.
Overcoming fierce management opposition to statutory change — and, in the Carter era, a Senate filibuster — was always left to organized labor itself and its few reliable allies on Capitol Hill. Democrats in the White House never put labor law reform ahead of business-backed priorities like deregulation, privatization, or trade liberalization, with minimal protection for workers negatively impacted by it.
Early in Barack Obama’s first term, there was strong majority support, in both the House and Senate, for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). But his administration prioritized health care reform over EFCA and did not push for Senate rules reform that would have made progressive legislation, of any sort, more achievable. Nevertheless national unions continued to endorse and spend millions of dollars on Obama when he sought the presidency a second time.
Before and after his administration, the labor officialdom was similarly enthused about other corporate Democrats like Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, whose presidential campaigns did not succeed. One common denominator in labor, throughout this period, was limited consultation with rank-and-file workers about presidential endorsement decisions.
The AFL-CIO itself has highlighted the shortcomings of this “traditional candidate endorsement model.” In a fifteen-year-old guide called “Ten Rules for Talking to Union Members About Politics,” the federation declared that “union political action should always be ‘of, by, and for’ the members.” Otherwise, it will not counter widespread working-class cynicism about “politics and politicians.”
According to the AFL-CIO, its affiliates can “demonstrate that internal decision making about union political action is consistent with the core goal of empowering working people” by “providing members with opportunities to be involved . . . in the candidate evaluation and endorsement process.” This can be done by holding candidate forums, conducting opinion surveys, and sharing election-related information with the rank and file. And if the union is truly democratic, it will hold a binding membership vote to make its ultimate choice.
That form of rank-and-file empowerment is rare indeed, even in unions considered more progressive. As a result, organized labor was confronted, in the last three presidential election cycles, with challenges to top-down decision-making about the relative merits of candidates competing in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Party primaries and the 2024 general election.
These grassroots initiatives took the form of two rounds of “Labor for Bernie” (L4B) campaigning, involving thousands of rank-and-filers around the country, and last year’s bottom-up rallying of “Teamsters Against Trump” (TAT). The experience of L4B and TAT is worth examining amid the current soul-searching about why too many working-class people, including union members, voted for billionaire-backed candidates — or didn’t vote at all.
Union activists trying to make their voices heard in oppositional fashion in the future will face similar obstacles to challenging and changing leadership decisions about what politicians to back. Those hoping to launch more labor-backed independent candidacies, outside a corporate-dominated Democratic Party, will have an even harder time enlisting local and national union backing for such ventures, if past levels of official support for Labor for Bernie are any guide.
At the very least, as described below, L4B and TAT supporters learned some valuable lessons about how to shape rank-and-file opinion about politics, pressure AFL-CIO affiliates to adopt better approaches to political education and action, and boost “labor voter” turnout for candidates actually worthy of the union label or to defeat those who threaten the very existence of unions.
Labor for Bernie, 2016
Senator Bernie Sanders’s announcement in March 2015 that he was running for president was initially regarded by supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton as just a minor irritant. Sanders was one four lesser-known figures (including two state governors and a former senator) trying to make Clinton’s expected coronation as the Democratic Party nominee for the presidency in 2016 a trifle more difficult.
Corporate Democrats viewed Sanders with particular resentment as a party crasher. For the previous twenty-five years in Congress, he had been a frequent critic of both major parties. He also proudly maintained his ballot-line brand as an “Independent” rather than become a Democrat (while he caucused with them in the House and Senate). Most Clintonites viewed the antiwar socialist as a marginal protest candidate of the Dennis Kucinich sort, who wouldn’t win a single state primary (other than possibly Vermont’s).
Unfortunately for Clinton and a national AFL-CIO eager to endorse her, Sanders started out with a few more out-of-state friends than they realized — and quickly attracted hundreds of thousands more. Among them were union activists in the Northeast with much past personal experience working with Bernie on key labor causes, locally, regionally, and nationally. Sanders’s working-class orientation, political independence, and rejection of corporate money was a major selling point for them, not a personal liability.
As Don Trementozzi, leader of a Communications Workers of America (CWA) local based in New Hampshire, pointed out, “Bernie was not on the fence or the wrong side, like Hillary Clinton, when our union was campaigning against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He was helping us lead the fight against that job-killing free-trade deal backed by Democrats and Republicans alike.”
In far-off South Carolina, its state labor fed president, Erin McKee, was a fan of Sanders because, unlike Clinton, he was a reliable ally of the fight for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, for fast-food workers and everyone else.
John Murphy, a Carpenters Local 40 steward in Lowell, Massachusetts, favored Sanders because of his “long record of supporting workers and their right to unionize.” When some fellow building trades members questioned whether Bernie could win, Murphy told them, “That’s up to us.”
On June 25, 2015, Trementozzi, McKee, and Murphy joined a thousand other local union elected officers, shop stewards, organizers, and rank-and-file members from fifty states and fifty-seven different unions who kicked off “Labor for Bernie 2016.” They urged their respective national unions and the AFL-CIO to get behind the only presidential candidate “who challenges the billionaires who are trying to steal our pensions, our jobs, our homes, and what’s left of our democracy.”
In a letter sent the same day to then AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, Labor for Bernie supporters strongly objected to any “premature endorsement” made without “the broadest possible membership participation in the electoral process.” Instead they urged the labor federation and its affiliates to sponsor grassroots candidate forums and debates, throughout the primary season, and forego making any presidential pick until the 2016 primaries were over.
This was definitely not the preferred timetable of the Clinton campaign or top union officials. So Trumka, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, and Nikki Budzinski, her labor outreach director, began conferring about how to overcome any delay in the AFL-CIO executive council’s endorsement of Clinton by the required two-thirds vote.
One such conversation with Trumka on this matter was held four months after L4B was launched. As WikiLeaks later disclosed, the AFL-CIO president, in Podesta’s words, was very “keen on convincing union members that they could trust HRC to fight for them.” According to Trumka, as recounted by Podesta, few unions were “feeling the Bern,” “only APWU [the American Postal Workers Union] was likely to endorse him,” and if “pushed hard” Larry Hanley, then president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), “might end up endorsing HRC.”
Podesta informed fellow Clinton campaign staffers that Trumka “didn’t think CWA was likely to go with Bernie” either and that “Larry Cohen [its recently retired national president] wasn’t playing that well at his surrogate appearances” in front of other labor audiences.
At the time of this exchange, CWA was — as recommended by the AFL-CIO itself — in the middle of a three-month process of membership meetings, telephone town halls, and other forms of information sharing about the 2016 presidential candidates, both Democrats and Republicans. The results of a binding online CWA membership poll, released in early December 2015, were not what Trumka predicted. Thanks to Cohen’s high-profile work as Sanders’s main emissary to the labor movement and voter turnout efforts within CWA by L4B supporters and their locals, CWA did “go with Bernie.” As CWA spokesperson Candice Johnson told the Intercept, “Tens of thousands of members voted in the poll, with Sanders getting a decisive majority.”
Headaches for Hillary
By this point in 2015, ten other national unions had, via their usual top-down decision-making, endorsed Clinton as fast as they could. But as a headline in Bloomberg News warned, “Labor for Bernie Means Headaches for Hillary” that were just beginning. Contrary to Trumka’s forecast, Cohen worked successfully with several other former AFL-CIO executive council colleagues whose unions became Bernie backers — including Hanley at the ATU, RoseAnn DeMoro at National Nurses United (NNU), and Mark Dimondstein, who is still president of APWU.
Before the 2016 primary season was over, the total membership of national unions in the Labor for Bernie camp reached one million (although only CWA backed him as a result of membership voting, as opposed to a leadership decision). L4B backers included both AFL-CIO affiliates and independents like the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).
Plus Sanders won the backing of more than one hundred local unions around the country, including many affiliated with national unions backing Clinton. Vocal minorities raised hell in the building trades, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and both major teachers’ unions when their top officials ignored membership advocacy on Sanders’s behalf.
Through grassroots organizing and online signature gathering, funded with a budget of less than $5,000, L4B developed a mailing list of 50,000 activists. They pledged to work within their own unions and communities to help Sanders win Democratic primaries in their respective states. As Donald Trump emerged as the likely Republican presidential nominee, Sanders continued to argue that he, not Hillary Clinton, was the general election candidate best positioned to counter Trump’s appeal to working-class voters disenchanted with business as usual.
During the June 2016 Democratic primary in New York, while losing to Clinton there, Sanders even challenged Trump to a debate — an invitation the latter wisely declined — to prove this point. The national AFL-CIO did not officially endorse his opponent until that same month, long after the late February executive council meeting at which Trumka originally hoped to confirm the federation’s backing of Clinton.
Before she became the party’s nominee, with critical backing from unelected Democratic National Convention “super-delegates,” union activists helped Sanders win primary elections in twenty-three states and amass thirteen million votes overall. About 250 Labor for Bernie supporters won delegate slots at the DNC in August 2016, where they continued to rally other Democrats against free trade and for Medicare for All.
A Hard Act to Follow?
After the fall general election campaign, Labor for Bernie cofounder Rand Wilson and former ILWU organizing director Peter Olney were optimistic that Sanders supporters would remain part of an ongoing cross-union formation. All that was needed, they argued, was “sufficient union resources to coordinate our work” and labor leadership willing to “form a coordinating body and staff to begin implementing a unifying program in selected campaigns at the state and national level.” This “new force for a democratic economy” would also tackle issues like climate change and “our permanent war economy and militarized foreign policy.”
Such ambitious postelection goals proved hard to achieve, despite the promising June 2017 launch of Labor for Our Revolution, which tried to steer trade unionists toward the 300 local or state committees then rallying former Sanders supporters under the banner of Our Revolution (OR).
Six months before, a surprising number of recent Labor for Bernie veterans had already detached themselves from its national mailing list after they received a general election appeal to elect Clinton. And without the unifying focus of the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, even pro-Bernie national unions “soon reverted to doing their own thing in politics,” Wilson recalls.
OR remains a key organizational advocate for Democratic Party rules reform, foe of big money in politics, and backer of progressive candidates, many of whom were inspired by Sanders’s first race. Chaired by Larry Cohen, OR aided Sanders’s second presidential campaign and continues to champion workers’ rights and grassroots opposition to the wide-ranging Republican attacks on democracy, unleashed after January 20 of this year.
The difficulty of fostering a durable vehicle for independent political initiatives, rooted in unions, was the subject of a recent phone conversation with now retired California Nurses Association/NNU leader RoseAnn DeMoro, a key Labor for Bernie advocate in 2016. As DeMoro lamented, “The hold of the Democratic Party on organized labor is something to behold.” And the truth of that was definitely on display in 2019–2020.
Labor for Bernie, 2020
Three years after the Electoral College put Trump, rather than Clinton, in the White House, the Democratic presidential primary field for 2020 looked, initially, nothing like the eventual two-person duel between Sanders and Clinton in 2016. Nearly twenty Democrats — including two of Trump’s fellow billionaires — competed to replace him.
This created far more difficult terrain for the second iteration of Labor for Bernie. Sanders now faced competition not just from a plethora of corporate Democrats but also from Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, long identified with many progressive causes. As a result, recalls one Sanders advisor, his pandemic-disrupted second run for the presidency “didn’t have the same magic” or single galvanizing primary opponent with a questionable record of support for labor.
L4B was officially relaunched in May 2019. With an eventual budget of $35,000, it was able to hire some full-time help, a departure from the all-volunteer effort three years before. Local committees became active again in LA, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. As in 2016, they circulated petitions seeking labor voter pledges to support Sanders in the primaries. They organized debate parties, spoke on Bernie’s behalf at local union meetings, and marched in Labor Day parades.
According to Paul Prescod, then a teacher’s union activist in Philly, L4B lobbied the local labor council to host a “Workers Presidential Summit,” featuring seven candidates, and then turned out supporters for the event. Hundreds of union members attended but, Prescod recalls, it ended up having “a sleepy feeling,” particularly when Joe Biden spoke. Bernie, per usual, got the most cheers — when he called for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and a Workplace Democracy Act.
In a crowded primary field, rank-and-file cheering did not translate into as much official labor backing as Bernie received four years before. In late September 2019, Jonah Furman, the labor outreach coordinator for Sanders’s second campaign, reported that its only national union endorser so far was the UE. That smaller union was later joined by two larger organizational backers of Bernie in 2016 — the APWU and NNU.
The latter, whose independent spending on Sanders’s behalf reached $1 million, according to one former staff member, devoted only a fraction of those resources the second time around. After a post-2016 change in presidents, neither the ILWU and ATU even endorsed Sanders again.
In a September 2019 article for Labor Notes entitled “Members Demand a Voice in Their Unions’ Presidential Endorsements,” Furman reported that “several national unions had revised their presidential endorsement processes, in response to members’ dissatisfaction with the procedures used in 2016” — that were widely protested by labor backers of Bernie’s first campaign.
The largest union that backed Sanders’s first race, CWA, changed its endorsement process too, but not for the better. While Sanders was in the process of garnering 9.5 million votes and placing first in eight primary elections, CWA headquarters officials refused to conduct another binding membership poll to determine its 2020 presidential endorsement, since that is not a requirement of the CWA constitution (or any other union’s).
Sanders contributed to this setback by informing CWA, via his 2020 presidential candidate questionnaire, that he favored antitrust action in the telecom industry. In an accompanying message, Sanders called his otherwise very pro-labor positions “a snapshot of our great history together — and a glimpse of how promising and bold our future together will be, with your support.” When informed that antitrust action harmful to several hundred thousand unionized workers and their customers would mainly be a boon for nonunion competitors to AT&T and Verizon, Sanders stubbornly refused to withdraw his ill-advised campaign plank.
Then in spring 2020, COVID-19 made further in-person campaigning very difficult. As other candidates dropped out and threw their support to Biden, he became the last corporate Democrat standing between Bernie and the nomination. Faced with another convention delegate count deficit he could not overcome, Sanders withdrew from the race, at which point the CWA executive board backed Biden as labor’s best bet for defeating Trump.
While the CWA national union reverted to form, the 10,000-member University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE)–CWA Local 9119, its largest West Coast affiliate, ignored instructions from headquarters not to endorse a Democratic primary candidate on its own. This active pro-Bernie local in 2016 put the choice of Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the rest of the 2020 field before its own members. Sanders won again with 66 percent, with Warren coming in second with 22 percent of those voting.
Another 2016 Labor for Bernie backer was the California-based National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). This statewide labor organization invited Sanders, Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and others in the field to address its 2019 stewards conference. NUHW then empowered members of that body, plus rank-and-filers voting online, to choose among them, based on their live video presentations and candidate questionnaire responses.
The result was a joint endorsement of Sanders and Warren, reflecting membership sentiment that was about evenly split. Sanders went on win the California primary in March 2020 with help from these and other labor supporters more enthusiastic about his candidacy than the already failed one of their own US senator, Kamala Harris.
Teamsters Against Trump, 2024
The organizational model of labor activists forming an ad hoc group to rally fellow workers against the general election threat of Donald Trump wasn’t totally abandoned in 2024, even in the absence of another Sanders campaign. Instead it was refashioned as an emergency response to a decision by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) not to endorse anyone for president last year.
Although not a federation affiliate, the IBT, to its credit, did follow the AFL-CIO guide for endorsing candidates, including by making the results of IBT membership polling and “town hall meetings” unusually transparent. In the union’s first round of that opinion sampling and shaping, in the spring of 2024, about 12,000 Teamsters participated in an in-person “straw poll” in their local union halls, filling out cards indicating their preferred candidate. Joe Biden emerged as the favorite over Trump by a 44 to 36 percent margin.
When an outside contractor hired by the IBT conducted a nonbinding online poll after Biden’s withdrawal from the race, members had another opportunity to do voter turnout on behalf of their preferred candidates. Trump was backed by 59 percent of the 35,000 members participating, while Biden’s replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, received only 34 percent. An overlapping phone survey of 900 Teamsters, conducted by Lake Research Partners in early September, displayed the same level of support for Trump (58 percent) but even less for Harris (31 percent).
Based on the positive results of IBT’s contract campaign against UPS, involving 350,000 workers, the year before, IBT president Sean O’Brien and secretary-treasurer Fred Zuckerman both entered this presidential election year “overwhelmingly popular with Teamster members” according to one longtime Teamster reformer. This backer of O’Brien and Zuckerman, when they won office three years ago, hoped that they would “use their deep credibility with Teamsters and other workers to oppose Trump and get out the vote, especially in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, and other critical states.”
Going to Bed With the GOP
That did not happen, on Harris’s behalf, in the absence of any mandate from the membership. O’Brien made matters worse when his foolish indulgence of the GOP’s pro-worker feint and petty gripes about past personal interactions with Harris and Sen. Chuck Schumer took him down the same road as some of his most benighted late-twentieth-century predecessors. All played footsie with Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush while the rest of organized labor tried to keep them out of the White House.
On July 15, the IBT president wangled a high-profile speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. There he cleverly denounced union busting by corporate America in front of a slack-jawed conservative crowd. But with many of his own members watching then or later, he also lent credence to the fanciful notion that faux-populists like senators J. D. Vance, Josh Hawley, and Markwayne Mullin — and even his convention host, Donald Trump — could be helpful legislative allies on some labor issues.
This performance angered and disappointed Teamsters opposed to the GOP’s larger agenda, which (as demonstrated since January 20 of this year) remains fiercely anti-union. Nevertheless, the O’Brien-dominated IBT executive board officially decided on September 18 to remain neutral in the presidential race, which immediately put a hastily assembled network called Teamsters Against Trump (TAT) into overdrive.
Formed last August, TAT was funded by concerned individuals and progressive organizations who quickly raised a war chest of $500,000. They hired a full-time national organizer for three months — and deployed a mixed crew of Teamster volunteers and more than fifty stewards working on a “lost-time” basis. TAT sometimes had the benefit of operating on friendly turf. That’s when Teamsters were doing GOTV work within IBT locals, caucuses, or joint councils — representing nearly a million members — who declared their support for Harris, despite the no-endorsement stance of their top leadership in Washington.
In too many parts of the country, “the sad reality is that many Teamsters and other union members bought Trump’s populist persona and rhetoric,” said TAT supporter Dan Campbell. “So it was our job to engage them.” TAT phone-bankers, leaflet distributors, and texters like Campbell focused on fellow Teamsters in several key Rust Belt states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as North Carolina and Arizona. Some TAT activists joined state AFL-CIO canvassing efforts that, in four of those states, helped Democrats win Senate races against Trump supporters, even while Trump beat Harris there.
For Campbell, a retired UPS driver in Wisconsin and longtime activist in Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), one key motivating issue was very personal. In 2021, he says, the Biden administration won passage of the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Plan Relief Act, which “saved my pension and the retirement security of 400,000 other Teamsters across the Midwest and South. Every single Republican Senator opposed this, but Harris as vice president showed up to cast the tie-breaking vote for it in the Senate.”
TAT campaigners also warned Teamster voters that if stronger National Labor Relations Board enforcement activity was stopped under Trump, critical IBT organizing efforts, at Amazon and other companies, would become much harder. Since January 20, that greater difficulty is now a reality, not just a possibility (although Sean O’Brien confidently assured Tucker Carlson, in a postelection interview, that “I’m going to put Amazon on its knees.”).
Betting on Democracy
Last year, there was another big blue-collar union, also with new leadership, that weighed in differently on the presidential election, but not by deepening its own recent process of internal democratization. The United Auto Workers entered 2024 with great momentum, having just held the first-ever direct election of its own top officers. That resulted in leading members of the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) slate becoming an executive board majority.
It was no easy task for new UAW president Shawn Fain to rally members who felt cynical and disengaged because of the corruption and dysfunction of the prior leadership. Yet during national contract talks two years ago, the UAW’s use of membership education and mobilization, unprecedented bargaining table transparency, and a selective strike strategy produced major auto industry gains, after years of divisive and demoralizing concessions.
A logical next step, in 2024, might have been changing the union’s approach to political action. If “one member, one vote” was a good way to get UAWD candidates elected and restore confidence in the union, why not also let the rank and file decide who the UAW should back for president, since that might add greater legitimacy to the union’s preferred candidate?
This was not the course taken by the new leadership. The UAW’s 400,000 members had the same limited and indirect voice last year that they had before UAWD’s victory. The question of who to endorse was decided by the union’s fifteen-member national executive board.
The much harder and politically riskier approach of empowering the membership gained popularity amid widespread enthusiasm for Sanders’s candidacies and L4B’s organizing around them. A decade later, using a more democratic method to endorse politicians is still the exception, not the rule.
That’s because a politically desirable outcome is not guaranteed, as demonstrated by the results of last year’s Teamster polling on Harris vs. Trump. Instead it is dependent on internal political education and the degree to which rank-and-filers get out the vote for their favored candidate, which CWA supporters of Sanders did successfully ten years ago.
CWA’s own subsequent backtracking from giving members the final say in 2000 and 2024 would not have been possible if the union’s constitution required it to conduct a binding membership vote on presidential candidate endorsements. In the absence of such a mandate, more local unions can follow the best practices of UPTE-CWA or NUHW.
They should find ways to empower their members at the local or state level to vet candidates and choose among them, based on union-provided information and advice, but without always giving the officialdom the final say. Over time, this greater willingness to trust an informed and engaged rank and file might even prove to be as contagious as “feeling the Bern” was in the heyday of Labor for Bernie.