OPINION:
Labor unions across the nation are fearing member defections to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, so they’ve started partisan campaigns aimed at reeducating their members that a Trump presidency is a bad thing.
“The AFL-CIO is preparing an education campaign to highlight some of Mr. Trump’s statements — such as that wages are too high — and lesser-known things about how he has run his businesses and treated employees,” Mike Podhorzer, the political director for the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, told The Wall Street Journal.
The AFL-CIO has also run anti-Trump digital advertisements, where it sends anti-Trump text messages to its members, The Journal reported.
The threat of defections is real.
Merged Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling data from the first four months of this year show that among white union households, support is split evenly between Mr. Trump and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton at 44 percent each. Mr. Trump’s populous economic message is clearly resonating with some union members, who have traditionally voted Democrat and mobilized the vote for Democratic nominees come election year.
An affiliated group with the AFL-CIO has sent canvassers out in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh to go door to door in working-class neighborhoods to gauge the level of Mr. Trump’s support. They found one in four Democrats showed a preference for him, a worrying data sign, The Journal reported.
They were encouraged, however, that many of these Democrats liked Mr. Trump because he wasn’t politically correct and spoke his mind. In their estimation, that means these voters can be reeducated to dislike Mr. Trump based on his policies.
“What we found is if we had longer conversations with them that layered on different approaches, we could move people,” Karen Nussbaum, Working America’s executive director told The Journal.
Good luck.
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