The bedrock of Democrat support is dissolving beneath their feet as blue-collar workers defy union bosses in a bid to keep their jobs, a dissident leader has warned.
Brian Pannebecker of Auto Workers for Trump 2024 said Kamala Harris will pay a heavy price for free trade policies which have decimated America’s industrial heartlands for decades.
‘The Democrats have been shipping our jobs to Mexico and China for over 40 years, so this process has just come to a head now with Donald Trump, and he’s speaking our language,’ he told Fox Business.
‘He knows what we want to hear, that he’s going to protect our industry before it completely disappears, and we’re going to vote for him in big numbers.
‘I’m saying 65 to 70 percent of the UAW members are pulling the lever for Donald J. Trump.’
Democrat leaders were furious when the Teamsters Union dropped their endorsement and general president Sean O’Brien spoke from the platform at the GOP convention in July.
The union said it could not back Harris because ‘extensive member polling showed no majority support for Vice President Harris and no universal support among the membership for President Trump’.
The International Association of Firefighters also denied her the endorsement it offered Joe Biden after taking ‘unprecedented steps to hear our members views on the candidates and the policy issues that matter most to them’.
The Teamsters are the only one of the top ten unions to withhold their endorsement from the Democrats, but Pannebecker said members were increasingly at odds with their leaders.
‘The mainstream media are a little bit late to the game,’ he noted.
‘This has been going on since the 1980s. Ronald Reagan and the Reagan Revolution gave Macomb County, where I’m from, the political nickname of ‘home of the Reagan Democrats’.
‘And that was when all the UAW members jumped over and voted for Ronald Reagan, and he won in a landslide. So, this has been going on for 40 years.’
The UAW released polling this week suggesting its members in the seven battleground states support Harris by a margin of 22 percent over her GOP rival.
Joe Biden worked hard to court the union under its left-wing leader Shawn Fain becoming the first president to walk a picket line during its dispute with three big US car manufacturers.
He was campaigning again in Pittsburgh on Saturday night at a meeting of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
But Trump too has been wooing the union vote, speaking to workers at a car component company in Detroit last month.
‘I will not allow, under any circumstances, the American auto industry to die,’ he promised. ‘I want it to thrive.
‘Get your union leaders to endorse me, and I’ll take care of the rest.’
A Marketing Resource Group poll of union members in Michigan earlier this month found Trump trailing his rival by a single point, 11 points up since April.
Many union voters ‘are receptive to Trump’s positions on policies like building electric vehicles, which some believe costs American auto workers jobs,’ Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University told Newsweek.
‘Even his rhetoric and views about trade and tariffs have convinced them would boost American manufacturing and create jobs in the US.’
Michigan union autoworker James Benson Jr explained why the Democrat pitch was backfiring with his colleagues.
‘I was a lifelong Democrat, voted for Obama both terms. And you know what? All I saw was more losses and more jobs going overseas,’ he told Fox & Friends.
‘During the Trump administration, nothing but growth and record sales.
‘At this point, the fake optics don’t work anymore. You can’t tell us that the ‘economy’s doing great. It’s just in your head. You’re not hurting’. No, we are hurting.
‘It’s frustrating for us because you hear all these things about, ‘Everybody wants EVs’.
‘Well, they don’t. The sales are abysmal.’