The International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined to endorse either Vice President Harris or President Trump for president. The AP reports here. Having polled its members, the union determined that Trump was the favored candidate, and that by a wide margin. The results released by the union (below) are striking.
Why not endorse Trump? I can’t answer that question. To borrow the tired metaphor, it might be a bridge too far for an organization that relies on the support of Democrats in Congress and the bureaucracy to do its will. In a statement announcing the non-endorsement, this quote was attributed President Sean O’Brien:
Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business. We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries—and to honor our members’ right to strike—but were unable to secure those pledges.
One wonders if union leadership hesitates to take a stand opposed by the vast majority of its members or if the release of the results is intended to make a statement of its own. Whatever the case, the sentiment of Teamsters members seems to me to reflect the transformation of our two political parties.
The Democrats have become the party of the elites, the professional classes, the college-educated, the overeducated, the virtucrats — all those who can afford to treat politics as form of conspicuous consumption — as well as those dependent on government transfers. The Republicans have become more or less the party of the working class. Joel Kotkin reflected on the ethnic components of this shift in “The election: An old picture changes” (behind National Review’s paywall).
Michael Barone is our master analyst of party transformation. He provides a historical overview in his current Claremont Review of Books review/essay “Shifting political parties” and in his book How American Political Parties Change (and How They Don’t), reviewed here by Sean Trende. To bring the story up to date, see Barone’s recent columns “The ‘White Dudes for Harris’ Zoom Call Was…Weird” and “The White College Graduates’ Party’s Candidate Doesn’t Know Economic History.”
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