A memo from the DNC chairman makes clear there will be no course correction.
T he Democratic Party has long fetishized unionized labor, fancying itself the party of the American worker. The Republican Party has only recently followed Democrats’ lead, appropriating for itself the mantle of “working-class party.” Both parties’ obsession with this demographic is wildly disproportionate to its numbers.
As Dominic Pino has detailed, the percentage of American wage and salary workers who are union members reached single digits last year for the first time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began measuring union membership rates in 1983 (when the figure was over 20 percent). Just under 6 percent of Americans are members of private sector unions. Over 30 percent of all unionized workers in the U.S. belong to public sector organizations. The two major parties have devoted outsize attention to this constituency not because it is a massive voting bloc but because Americans have a warm, nostalgic view of labor unions. They wouldn’t want to join one themselves, of course. But, in the abstract, they’re alright.
Joe Biden epitomizes this outlook. He talked endlessly about his affection for unions, styled himself the “most pro-union president” in American history, and even cosplayed on a picket line alongside people who hadn’t spent their entire adult lives in politics. And yet, throughout his presidency, Biden steadily shed the support of union households. Democrats talked a good game about supporting Americans who work with their hands, but their policies — up to and including support for expanded unionization — were focused on the boutique concerns of American college graduates.
The Biden-era Democrats’ vestigial attachment to the unionized worker that exists primarily in the Democratic imagination did not resonate with actual union members — at least not with those who aren’t federal contractors or government workers. Biden’s messaging strategy was a failed experiment, so you would think that Democrats might drop it. It seems, though, that they lack either the creativity or courage to do so.
A lengthy memo from Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin clarifies that the party’s strategy moving forward will not depart from Biden’s. The memo is replete with gauzy encomia to the theoretical ideal of unionized labor. Indeed, Martin seems resolved to cater to the narrowest band of committed Democrats to the exclusion of almost everyone else.
In the memo, the DNC chairman railed against the fact that Trump has “rolled back the clock by some sixty years” by rescinding a Lyndon Johnson–era executive order that he said prohibited “government contractors from discriminating in their hiring, firing, promotion, and pay practices.” By this, Martin is referring to a Trump action that put an end to “affirmative action” in federal hiring and contracting, as part of his sweeping initiative to pare back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Americans don’t like DEI for the same reasons they don’t like affirmative action: They reject racial discrimination. Trump’s order, designed to return “America to a merit-based society,” is not unpopular. Even in polls that find the public skeptical of many of Trump’s executive orders, his anti-DEI order comes “the closest” to enjoying “majority support.” Just as Martin attacked Trump for “carving up the federal government to sell for parts,” he may have unwittingly directed the public’s attention to some of this administration’s most welcome initiatives.
Martin went on to savage Trump for “dismantling workers’ collective bargaining protections.” This boilerplate rhetoric is thin gruel that gets thinner still when you click to the supporting link to find out that Martin is referring to a December 2024 Biden order that gave the members of the American Federation of Government Employees, all 42,000 of them, license to work from home in perpetuity. Once again, the return to in-person work is the sort of thing that is only unpopular among public sector union members, whose representatives complain ceaselessly about the hassle of and productivity lost to the daily commute. As the Courthouse News Network noted of recent polling, “only about 2 in 10 are opposed” to Trump’s return-to-work mandate.
Martin even attempts to make martyrs out of the National Labor Relations Board members who were shown the door by the new president. Even if we assume that a measurable number of American voters are aware of and moved to action on behalf of the NLRB (a risky wager), Martin is effectively staking a claim to the notion that Biden’s use of the board to pursue political goals was popular.
But what do workers really think? Do most of them resent the secret-ballot rules that often show that workers do not want to be union members unless they are forced to cast their ballots out in the open, where they can be surveilled and punished for making the wrong choice? Do they think it’s the NLRB’s job to force another vote if foolish workers who don’t understand their own economic interests get those votes wrong? Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Labor might, which is why she’s a terrible pick to lead that agency and should not be confirmed. But her nomination alone demonstrates the degree to which Trump has out-triangulated Democrats when it comes to appealing to labor voters.
To the extent that Martin lands any of the haymakers he threw in this memo, his attacks on Elon Musk’s influence over the administration and the specter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are of debatable merit. At least those two entities don’t poll particularly well. The rest of the document, however, represents a sop to the unions. It is an acknowledgement of their disproportionate influence over the Democratic Party’s evolution, to which it has put a stop. Say what you will about Trump’s GOP, you cannot say that it is not energetic, experimentative, and willing to throw off the shackles of ideology and convention. Democrats, by contrast, are stuck. Until the party develops a spine, it will remain that way.