President Joe Biden is on his way to Michigan on Tuesday to walk the picket line with striking autoworkers. It is a desperate and embarrassing move by a candidate who describes himself as the most “pro-union president” ever but who has failed to secure the endorsement of one of the nation’s biggest private sector unions – the UAW. The same UAW which, by the way, has endorsed every Democrat running for president in our lifetimes and backed Biden in 2020.
Biden is panicking as his polls sink ever deeper and his upbeat messaging about the state of the economy fails to gain traction. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows support for the president’s handling of the economy and immigration at career lows. In addition, 44% of respondents say they’ve become worse off since he took office – the most for any president since 1986.
Rubbing salt in the wound, voters are now essentially split on Donald Trump, with 47% approving of the former president and 49% disapproving; that approval number matches his all-time high while in office. When Trump exited the Oval Office, he had an approval rating of only 38%. In a hypothetical match-up next year, Trump beats Biden by 9 points.
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Worse for Biden, if the government is shut down over budget fights, 44% of voters would blame the president and his Democrat colleagues while only 33% would hold Republicans responsible. Wow – what a wipeout.
The ABC poll does not identify respondents’ ratings by income or race; for that analysis we turn to Economist/YouGov polling. In the most recent survey, 41% of those polled approved of Biden’s job performance, and 55% did not, about in line with the average of polls, according to Real Clear Politics. As worrisome as the totals, the breakdowns by race and income group must terrify the Biden camp.
Hispanics, for instance, register 48% disapproval and only 44% approval, shockingly low for a Democrat president. Even blacks show only tepid enthusiasm for Biden, with 57% approval. Given that exit polls found 87% of Blacks and 67% of Hispanics voted for Biden in 2020, the slide is ominous.
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Similarly, his lowest approval (39%) comes from middle-income Americans, earning $50,000 to $100,000 per year. In 2020, 56% of voters earning less than $100,000 went for Biden.
One group critical for Joe is union workers. To quote AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a 2020 post-election speech, “Biden’s path to the White House ran through America’s labor movement. Initial toplines from our post-election survey show union members went 58 percent for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. While the general public supported Biden by three points, our members favored him by 21 points. Simply put, we got out the vote. In Wisconsin. In Michigan. In Pennsylvania.”
Simply put, Joe Biden cannot win reelection without union voters. Hence, the president’s panicky decision to walk the picket line, the first time ever a president has taken sides so blatantly in a union negotiation.
But Biden’s relationship with the UAW is tricky. They blame him for pushing the transition to electric vehicles, mandating that 67% of all cars sold by 2032 be all-electric, a move that threatens the very existence of their rank-and-file. Not only does the assembly of EVs require 40% less labor than a conventional internal combustion engine, the supposed replacement jobs from manufacturing batteries have largely been planned in right-to-work states where automakers are able to hire non-union labor. Who loses? The UAW.
In June, Biden’s White House approved a $9.2 billion loan to fund three battery plants to be jointly operated by Ford and South Korea’s SK in Kentucky and Tennessee, both among the country’s 28 right-to-work states. Fain was outraged, asking, “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?” In Fain’s world, “corporate greed” describes any company trying to earn a profit, without which there would be no money for research and development, no new investment and no hiring of workers.
Weeks after the loan was announced, Sean Fain scored a meeting at the White House at which he reportedly pushed for “the president’s public support for strong labor standards in the transition to electric vehicles”, according to the Detroit News. A UAW spokesman doubled down, confirming that “attaching labor standards to subsidies and loans going to auto companies was a top priority.” Fain also demanded that Biden issue “public support for the union’s demands”, which the president has done on several occasions.
Fain also had harsh words for former president Donald Trump, who is planning to speak to union members in Detroit on September 27, the night of the second GOP debate. Trump has suggested that UAW’s leaders are not looking out for the workers’ best interests, and has blasted Biden’s push for electric vehicles, which he says will destroy the car industry and the union.
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Fain said in an emailed statement, “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers. We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class.”
Of course, the same could be said about millionaire Joe Biden.
Biden is struggling to keep union members in his column. Working-class Americans have been hammered by inflation on Biden’s watch, which many economists attribute to excessive federal spending splashed onto a fast-recovering economy. Since Biden took office, real wages (adjusted for inflation) have gone down 4 percent.
Voters blame not just outsized spending for inflation – they are also angry that Biden’s ongoing war on fossil fuels has caused oil and gasoline prices to rise again.
Union workers have drifted away from Democrats in recent years for good reason; time will tell if Uncle Joe marching with workers will bring them home again.
