Exit polls reveal why Trump made huge gains with blue-collar union members

[SunSeeker]

Trump ran up large margins among White voters without a college degree who belong to labor unions and also significantly improved among unionized non-White workers without advanced education, according to previously unpublished results from the exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the AP VoteCast survey conducted by NORC. Those are the two major data sources measuring voters’ behavior in the election available so far.“

Look, the Democratic Party has lost their way to some extent with working class voters,” said Ted Pappageorge, secretary treasurer of the powerful Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Las Vegas. “When we were (knocking) at the doors … it was pretty clear that Trump was winning the fight about dealing with inflation and kitchen table issues and Democrats essentially were being viewed as the party of abortion.”“To be honest, Biden has not been a credible messenger for a really long time,” Rosenthal said. “So despite the huge accomplishments, he was not communicating that. And I think it’s really difficult for a union to do that on its own. In the case of Harris, (rank-and-file union members) had no idea she cast the deciding vote on the pension bill, or she cast the vote that created tens of thousands of union jobs with the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Pappageorge said one issue essentially eclipsed everything else Biden delivered for working families and organized labor. “All of those things are important, but the No. 1 issue on the mind of working-class people, including union people, was inflation and the cost of living,” he said.

Pappageorge described Biden as “my hero” because of all of his accomplishments for working people, but he believes the president dug an insurmountable hole for the party by trying for months to emphasize the economy’s positive aspects rather than challenging companies raising prices and rents, as Harris forcefully did immediately after she entered the race. “Kamala had the best message we saw; we think her message was on point,” Pappageorge said. “If Biden had been running on Kamala’s program earlier, I think they would have reaped the benefit of that. But they didn’t. They tried to tell working class people the economy is setting records.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/10/politics/trump-blue-collar-workers-analysis/index.html