Teamsters Expose Fatal Harris Weakness

When Teamsters President Sean O’Brien announced that his union would not endorse any presidential candidate in 2024, the Democrats echoed the rest of the unions in their howls of outrage. Even the Teamsters’ vice-president, John Palmer, accused O’Brien of pandering to the membership — which voted 58-31 in favor of endorsing former President Trump. It isn’t clear who Palmer thinks he represents, but the implications for the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris are obvious. She is the first Democratic presidential nominee in decades to be snubbed by the Teamsters and it reveals a lethal weakness in her working class support.

According to the most recent New York Times/Siena College survey, Harris trails Trump by 36 points among white working class voters. As Ruy Teixeira pointed out last month at the Liberal Patriot, this means she is doing worse among these voters than either of Trump’s previous two Democratic opponents. Joe Biden lost them by 26 points in 2020 and Hillary Clinton lost them by 27 points in 2016. Harris does lead Trump among non-white working class voters by 24 points, according to the NYT/Siena poll. Yet Joe Biden won these voters by 48 points in 2020 and Hillary Clinton won them by 60 points in 2016. All of this suggests that Harris is badly underperforming among working-class voters regardless of their race.

But what about the much ballyhooed advantage enjoyed by Democrats among college-educated voters? Harris does fare better than Trump among these voters according to most polls. Her problem is that there just aren’t enough of them. According to an April study by Pew Research, “Voters who do not have a four-year degree make up a 60 percent majority of all registered voters.” And the study contains even more bad news for her: “By nearly two-to-one (63% vs. 33%), white voters without a bachelor’s degree associate with the Republican Party.” This is particularly dangerous for Harris in the blue wall states. Why? They are the whitest of all the real electoral battlegrounds. As Ronald Brownstein writes at CNN:

Whites account for about three-fourths of the population in Michigan and Pennsylvania and roughly four-fifths in Wisconsin. Although their Latino communities are growing, Blacks remain the largest minority group in each of them. The three states are also slightly older than the nation overall, with seniors accounting for about one-fifth of the population in each. None have many immigrants, with residents born abroad accounting for only about 7 percent of the population in Michigan and Pennsylvania and just 5 percent in Wisconsin.

That the population of these states is older than the rest of the country compounds Harris’s working class problem. Seniors have long voted in higher proportions than any other age group, and their numbers are steadily increasing. Moreover, according to a recent survey conducted by Retirement Living, their top concern matches that of working class voters — the rising cost of living. The NYT/Siena poll shows Harris trailing Trump 50-44 among voters 65 and older. This is why Harris has been falsely claiming that Trump plans to cut Social Security and Medicare. He has not, of course, made any such proposal. As the New York Post reports, Trump wants to abolish the tax seniors pay on their Social Security income.

This is of a piece with Trump’s proposal to eliminate federal taxes on tips, which he unveiled on June 9 during a Nevada rally. According to a report by AP, the proposal would affect millions of working class Americans: “The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there are 2.24 million waiters and waitresses across the country, with tips making up a large percentage of their income.” Trump’s proposal caught the Democrats flatfooted, and the corporate media produced a plethora of absurd opinion pieces claiming the tax cut would harm its beneficiaries. Then, Harris “fixed” the problem by stealing the idea. Meanwhile, according to an NBC News report, the Democrats are working on a new definition for “working class”:

The effort started with an attempt to better understand the working class of the 21st century by creating a more nuanced definition of the demographic and breaking it down into seven values-based typologies. Those categories were based on a battery of 40 questions put to more than 5,000 participants in surveys conducted with HIT Strategies, a Democratic research firm … The report sorted people into seven subtypes, each of roughly equal size, arranged on the ideological spectrum from “Next Gen Left” to “Core MAGA.”

No, this is not a gag from The Babylon Bee. This, with the 2024 presidential election looming on the horizon, is how the Democratic Party of Kamala Harris is approaching an existential threat. This is how those “highly educated elites,” about whom we have heard so much, approach a very real problem instead of gathering a group of working stiffs together and asking a simple question like, “Please explain what we’re doing that pisses you off so much?” They actually believe that breaking people down into “values-based typologies” and arranging them “on the ideological spectrum” is actually going to produce useful information. What it is likely to produce is a Democratic defeat — assuming there is no skullduggery.

This brings us back to the Teamsters and the following question: If the rank-and-file members voted overwhelmingly to endorse Donald Trump, why didn’t Sean O’Brien and the union board do so? For the same reason the Biden-Harris administration ignores the will of the people with regard to illegal immigration, energy policy, foreign policy, domestic crime, the economy, ad infinitum. O’Brien doesn’t represent the membership. He simply adopted a position that allowed him to avoid being tarred and feathered. Our rulers in the swamp believe they are better insulated from the whims of the hoi polloi. But they blundered when they chose Kamala Harris to be their sock puppet. So, we have one last chance to restore the republic.

READ MORE from David Catron:

The Most Important Question Harris Can’t Answer

Harris Will Defeat Herself During Debate

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