A Listening Tour with Labor’s Trump Voters: Post-Election Union Strategy

With Donald Trump in the White House and American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) loyalists running the Congress, the labor movement faces an extremely dangerous time. Every attack we have seen in state legislatures since Wisconsin’s Act 10—“right to work,” “paycheck protection,” attacks on minimum wage and the right to sue over race or sex discrimination—is coming our way in Washington, D.C. For at least the next two years, unions must concentrate on blocking the worst of the GOP initiatives in whatever way possible.

But this cannot be all we do. We also need to build for the longer term, in two specific ways. First, we need to help reconstruct the Democratic Party along the lines of the Sanders campaign. Second, we need to reach out to Trump voters among our members, to organize a critical mass of them onto a more progressive agenda.

The 2016 election marked the end of neoliberal hegemony in American politics—for both parties. After forty years of neoliberalism, life has simply gotten too rough in America for voters to be satisfied with moderate platforms. For the right, this means moving from dog-whistle racism to something more overt. For the left, it means more directly challenging the corporate and financial elites. Reshaping the party around Sanders’ call to action is as realistic a course to victory as any—and it is the only type of platform around which unions can unite their members in a time of escalating hardship.

As part of this longer-term effort, it is critical that unions use the coming year to reach out to members who supported Trump. Such a proposal is not without risk. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and threats against Muslims, Latinos, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community played a central role in the Trump movement, and these are obviously not things with which one can compromise. But there were also a significant number of Trump supporters driven by the experience of economic decline and abandonment.

Many working people inadvertently voted against their own economic interests in supporting Trump. But others voted rationally. Manufacturing workers who supported Trump because they believed he would block the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Clinton would sign it were, I believe, correct. Miners who believed the Democrats’ solution to global warming was for coal jobs to be permanently wiped out—with no compensation and no backup plan—also correctly perceived reality. Many of these are people who voted for Trump and also for a higher minimum wage, a right to paid sick leave, defending Social Security, and defeating TPP.

The truth is that there is a lot we simply do not know. What motivated which members to support Trump? Which of these motives are ones we can respect and which are not? Which suggest a common platform around which we could build future political initiatives? Who, specifically, are the members and member-leaders we might work with to move in a different direction? We need to know the answers to these questions, because there is simply no way to move forward without organizing a significant number of 2016 Trump voters around progressive demands.

At this moment, no one can say exactly what such an agenda might look like. To figure this out, unions should spend the next year conducting hundreds of “listening meetings” with conservative members—without compromising our insistence on racial and gender justice, but also without condescension or dismissal. These should not be focus groups carried out by anonymous professionals. Such meetings are a first step toward building a bridge—whose shape we do not yet know—between alienated members and the rest of the union. Furthermore, we need to use these listening sessions to identify rank-and-file leaders among the Trump supporters who can help organize coworkers for a more progressive agenda. If we spend a year conducting such meetings, we will know what the strategic path toward building a progressive alliance capable of winning elections is.

. . . [U]nions should spend the next year conducting hundreds of “listening meetings” with conservative members . . .

This does not mean reconfiguring our movement to put Trump supporters at its center, or crafting a program that aims to appeal to Trump voters as a whole. If even just 10 percent of Trump supporters change their views, we would see a sea change in American politics. The job of the labor movement is to figure out the political program around which we can organize our membership—including at least 10 percent of those members who voted for Trump in 2016.

In carrying out this mission, the labor movement will also be plotting a path forward for the left as a whole. As mass membership organizations, unions are in a unique position to engage Trump voters and have a self-interest in identifying economic demands that will unite rather than fracture their memberships. What unions learn from a year’s worth of listening meetings will be critical intelligence for building a Sanders-style party capable of winning elections.

Traditionally, unions have been very wary of engaging conservative members—and with good reason. An estimated one-third of union members are Republicans, and many locals have experienced long-simmering tensions between this block of dissenters and the rest of the membership. Leaders fear that engaging these members in political conversation will deepen divisions within the organization or stir up uncontrollable conflicts. Such fear is reasonable, but it is also fatal: Internal tensions will only grow more pronounced the longer they are ignored. And if we allow political loyalties to be cemented into place along the lines drawn on November 8, we will have no way out of this crisis.

[U]nions have been very wary of engaging conservative members—and with good reason.

In a few years, it will become clear that President Trump has not delivered on the promise of making economic life better for the workers who placed hope in him. This is the point at which things could get even more dangerous than they are now. With no credible economic promise, Trump will look to whip up even greater frenzy around white nationalism to maintain his base’s loyalty. This is the moment the labor movement must prepare for—the point where Trump’s working-class supporters will turn either right or left, and the point by which we must already have built a common organization with enough Trump supporters to make a racist, rightward lurch impossible.

It is not the cleverness of consultants or the purity of proclamations but the slow, messy work of organizing that is the path out of this nightmare.