The Wrong Way to Win Back the Working Class

Jonathan Chait: “In its period of exile, the Democratic Party has a lot of decisions to make. One of those decisions concerns its relationship with organized labor. Joe Biden and members of his administration—and, indeed, much of the party’s leadership—believed that forming a historically tight partnership with organized labor would help arrest the party’s decline with the working class. They turned out to be wrong. Working-class voters, even the small and shrinking share of them who belong to private-sector unions, continued drifting away, seemingly unimpressed by Union Joe’s long list of policy concessions.”

“Having seen their labor strategy collapse, Democrats are weighing two choices. One school of thought, favored on the progressive left, is that if Biden didn’t win back working-class voters, it’s because he wasn’t pro-union enough. For example, a recent newsletter by Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama-administration official turned podcaster, argues that the path to winning back blue-collar voters requires (among other things) that Democrats ‘become even more pro-union.’ Pfeiffer doesn’t explain why a more ardent alliance with organized labor would succeed for future Democratic candidates when it failed for Biden, or even how exceeding Biden on this score would be possible. The necessity and utility of the maneuver is simply taken as axiomatic.”

“A wiser strategy, one that a handful of Democrats have gingerly broached, would be to revert to the party’s traditional, pre-Biden stance toward labor. This approach would recognize that the political cost of trying to satisfy the labor movement’s every demand is rising, and the number of votes that the movement delivers in return for such fealty is shrinking. The experience of the Biden administration, and of some Democratic-run localities, suggests that automatic deference to unions can undermine what ought to be politicians’ top priority right now: lowering the cost of living. Which means it is making the goal of winning back working-class voters harder, not easier.”