Organized labor has been arguably
the most important Democrat voting block for decades, but it isn't a happy group. Three reasons predominate.
The first – globalization – proves that sometimes in geopolitics the conventional wisdom is true: a
lot of low- and mid-skilled manufacturing capacity has decamped America.
The second – technology – is more complicated. In part unionized workers haven't been able to keep up with relentless technological march of the Digital Age. In part new information technologies, especially more recent developments such as 3D-printing, have enabled production to relocate quickly and easily outside of unionized areas. Marry globalization to tech, and supply chains tend to get broken into many, many small pieces, while simultaneously getting scattered across the world.
For most Americans, digitization and free trade worked out great, enabling access to cheaper goods and while allowing the American workforce to focus on big value-added stuff like product design. No wonder that from 1985 through 2015 most Congressional Democrats stood shoulder-to-shoulder with business-led Republicans in pushing trade deals through Congress. But blue-collar workers? They didn't do so well. Unemployment and opiates ensued.
Third, is an oft-overlooked cultural aspect. Outside of old-school manufacturing and coal mining, organized labor never penetrated into most of the private sector. Old-school manufacturing and coal mining had their hey-days over a half century ago, when most of the people with the "good" jobs were male and white. No other non-racial, non-gender voting block is as concentrated by race and gender. Which means as old-school manufacturing and coal jobs were lost, they were nearly invariably lost by white men.
Perhaps as important, the sort of work that most private-sector union populations engage in is called "blue collar" for good reason. It tends towards the physically demanding. At the risk of sounding a bit classist, folks who throw rivets or sling trees probably don't have doctorate degrees or live in high-rise condos. As a rule, such occupations are filled with people (read: white dudes) who have limited experience with other cultures and who are much more grounded in traditional society of church and family. They tend in the general direction of social conservatism. No matter what the Simpsons would have us believe, there are
no gay steel mills.
And so union members have been inching Republican for the better part of the past two decades. Trump's rise presented union workers with a social conservative, anti-trade, anti-tech politician, and they went in whole hog. (I'm speaking here of
private sector unions.
Public sector unions are mostly white-collar workers and are an entirely different beast.)
Another faction in motion are America's
Hispanics. There's a persistent belief on both the Left and Right that the Democrats are the party of the minorities, so Hispanic voters must choose blue and therefore the Democrats are pushing to open America's southern border to unrestricted in-migration in order to help win the numbers game.
The reality is quite different. First-generation Hispanic-Americans and undocumented Hispanics do indeed tilt Left, especially on economic issues, but those who are undocumented cannot vote so an open border generates no immediate gains. As the generations tick buy, not only does Hispanic identity become a lot less "sticky" with many Hispanics-Americans even self-identifying as
white, but Hispanics' underlying social conservatism tends to bleed through the more America-established a Hispanic becomes. And regardless of generation, Hispanics are not nearly as pro-blue as other minorities.
Democrats' problem with this "faction" is a getting-to-know-you issue that is rooted in the very word "Hispanic". It includes Spanish speakers such as Mexicans, Spaniards, Argentineans, Colombians and Puerto Ricans, but also people of Native descent from throughout Latin America who might have never spoken a word of Spanish in their lives. Even within each of those many categories exists bewildering diversity; for example, Cubans living in New Jersey and Florida are historically, culturally and politically distinct. (There is also something to be said about the insistence of White liberals’ increasing use of the term
Latinx as a woke-ism in Hispanic messaging despite its mixed reception within Spanish-speaking communities.)
The incessantly direct mistake the Democrats continually make with this "group" is their political messaging. Pollsters tell us Hispanics regularly list economic issues and health care as their primary concerns, but the Democrats insist upon barraging Hispanics with ads about border issues and immigration. Such a racist approach speaks to what Democrats feel Hispanic-Americans "should" care about and does
not go over well. Especially since the issue that Hispanic-Americans tend to be most conservative on is none other than immigration. Doubly so when it comes to the multi-generational Mexican-American communities in Texas and Cuban-American communities in Florida.
The Democratic Party seems completely incapable of accepting any of this. In contrast, Trump embraced it. The day House Democrats voted to impeach Trump (the first time), the president of the AFL-CIO labor federation was in the Oval Office to sing glory to Trump for his successful inclusion of organized labor's concerns into the NAFTA2 treaty. The Democrats only found out when the press release happened. Just as with the unions, the Democrats have taken Hispanic-Americans for granted,
knowing they are blue. Just as with the unions, TeamTrump proved far more capable of speaking to the concerns and fears of Hispanic-Americans. And so Trump captured nearly every county on the U.S.-Mexico border,
in addition to increasing the Republicans' share of Hispanic-American votes in Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia and Ohio.
The Democratic self-delusion that they have more votes and so are destined to win could permanently disable them very soon. Since everyone in the
new Republican Party is exclusively social conservative, it is even
more cohesive than the old Republican Party which was already more cohesive than the Democrats. With the unions and Hispanics adding their voting heft to the new Republican alliance, it could well prove impossible for the new, reduced and blinkered Democrats to win high office ever again.
There are only two ways forward for the Democrats in their quest against electoral irrelevance.
The first possibility is that the Republicans might provide an opening. The old-guard Republicans – business, national security and fiscal conservatives – may attempt to recapture their party from the social conservatives in general, and the rightist populists in specific. Succeed or fail, the populist genie cannot be shoved back in the bottle and we'd see the sort of incessant infighting we're used to seeing among of the Democrats. For more on the state of the Republican Party, see
Part III of this series.
The second possibility is that the Democrats might be able to leverage the internal factional conflicts wracking both the Republicans and themselves to…trade up. This second, intriguing, possibility has three pieces:
First, the ignorant arrogance of the hard Left may prove their undoing.
The Democrats' long held and misplaced view that they are the natural ruling party has encouraged grassroots activists to insist upon litmus tests for candidates. The idea being that no one should be allowed to run as a Democrat unless they commit publicly to a lengthening list of ideologically liberal purist positions. In most cases, such efforts end in disaster. In the much vaunted "blue wave" of the 2018 midterm elections, hard leftist Democrat candidates failed to flip a single Congressional seat blue. The effort to install correct-minded candidates in the 2020 elections nearly cost the Democrats the House
and the Senate
and the Presidency.
Even worse for the Democrats, the application of ideological litmus tests has started to be applied not simply to representatives and candidates, but to
voters. Case in point from the 2020 election, the woke Left insisted – loudly – that anyone who did not rank-order racial justice as
the most important issue of the day was racist. Telling 90+% of the American population that they are racist is a guaranteed way to lose support. Not even Americans of minority groups bought that particular line of crap: Trump received a greater proportion of Black and Hispanic votes than any Republican in modern history. Gays, the Democrat voting block that tends to police their own most vehemently, once again sent roughly a quarter of their votes to Republican candidates. (Exit polls being exit polls, take that figure with some salt. But do keep in mind most who lie to pollsters about their vote do so when they voted for the guy they aren't "supposed" to.)