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Obama and the Union Vote

Polls suggest mandate for reform surpasses support for Obama

By David Moberg

One persistent question ran throughout stories on the presidential campaign, especially after Hillary Clinton won primaries with strong support from working-class white voters: If Barack Obama was the nominee, could he win their support?

While Election Day polls don’t provide a definitive answer, the short answer seems to be that Obama did moderately well among working-class white voters, especially if they were union members.

But he did receive far fewer votes from white workers than he would have if they voted their economic interests. That is especially clear in light of Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels’ evidence that there has been stronger economic growth and less inequality under post-World War II Democratic administrations than under Republicans.

Exit polling does confirm that Obama did better among white voters overall than either Kerry or Gore. He also ran better among lower-income than upper-income whites. But he performed more strongly among college-educated whites than those without a college degree.

But the relatively smaller advantage for McCain among college-educated whites reflects the preferences of the best-educated. People with post-graduate degrees—17 percent of the electorate and disproportionately white—voted 58 to 40 percent for Obama. But all voters who graduated from college split nearly evenly, and were Obama’s weakest group by education.

If more voters belonged to a union, Obama would have won more decisively, even among white voters.

Election-night polling by Peter Hart for the AFL-CIO showed that 67 percent of union members voted for Obama while only 30 percent chose McCain. (Compare that to the 51 to 47 percent advantage Obama had over McCain in exit polls of non-union voters.) The union advantage was slightly higher in battleground states.

Most dramatically, union membership made a big difference in how well Obama performed. Union members over 65 voted by a 46-point margin for Obama, while all voters over 65 voted for McCain by an 8-point margin. Obama won by 23 points among white non-college graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among all white non-college voters.

Obama lost heavily among gun owners and white weekly churchgoers—except if they were union members. Then they voted for Obama, though by slim margins.

Voters who were among the 2.5 million members of the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate, Working America, voted much the same as union members.

Over the course of the campaign, unions’ intensive campaign of mail, phone calls, workplace contacts and home visits boosted positive feelings about Obama from 58 percent in June to 70 percent on Election Day. Negative feelings dropped from 25 to 19 percent during the same period.

Non-managerial workers overwhelmingly saw the economy or jobs as their major concern, and by a 53- to 34-percent margin saw Obama as likely to do a better job improving wages and working conditions for workers, according to a Celinda Lake survey for the Change to Win labor federation just before the election. Workers under 30 even more strongly judged that Obama would do more for workers and for them personally, according to the survey. And they felt he would better “restore the American dream,” which they saw as threatened,

By hefty margins, majorities of workers in Lake’s polls favored stronger government regulation of the economy, guaranteed health care, infrastructure spending to create jobs and reforms making it easier for workers to join unions.

Organized labor, vowing to hold the new Congress and administration accountable, will push for all those reforms. But reducing the barriers to union formation tops its agenda. And the polls indicate even deeper support for progressive reforms to help working people than support for Obama himself.

That suggests that the mandate for reform is even bigger than Obama’s personal mandate, and that Obama should push ambitious programs rather than tack to the political center-right to win popular support among workers—including those white working-class voters who may not have voted for him.

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• Reader Comments

  David Moberg writes that union members are voting their economic interest by supporting the Obama-Biden ticket. One important factor hurting workers has been the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and similar free-trade agreements. It encourages outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries.
  Moberg knows that both Obama and Biden support free trade.

  Joe Biden has been in Washington for three decades. What has he ever done to help workers? Read the excellent article by Michael Yates “Obama and the working class: what exactly does he have to say to them?”
  at http://www.counterpunch.org/yates08262008.html
  Obama’s first appointment was Rahm Emmanuel, who led Bill Clinton’s fight to get NAFTA through Congress.

  Obama is a strong campaigner, and a powerful orator, but his positions on the issues doesn’t differ from standard Democratic Party boilerplate, which includes support for free trade and other measures that hurt American workers.

  Posted by Nevada_Ned on Nov 10, 2008 at 3:06 PM

  My greatest worry in American politics is how Republicans have been so successful over the last 30 years in using race, religion and nationalism to get working class whites to vote against their own class interests.  In the South, especially, there seems almost no way to break through this Republican hold on white voters.  In places like Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, etc, they may simply be unreachable by any Democratic candidate. 

  In this respect, cultural politics have proven absolutely lethal for the Democratic Party in most elections since 1968.  In the future, though, I think Obama will be able to expand his reach among working class cultural conservatives, at least outside the South.  The key to that will be the sucess of his policies on the economy, unions, health care, housing and education. 

  It may be enough to keep Democratic control of the White House and Congress for eight or even sixteen years, and allow the current round of progressive reforms to become well established.  There may be nothing we can do to win most white southern voters, especially evangelicals, but perhaps it won’t be necessary. 

  Of course, if Obama follows the free trade-free market Clintonite policies, there will be no chance at all, but I do not think he’s going to do that.

  Posted by mcmchugh99 on Dec 22, 2008 at 11:01 AM

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