Long before President Trump harnessed a working-class coalition to win last November’s election, leaders of the nation’s biggest labor unions, in public and private, were warning Democrats that those voters could defect. In the months since, their admonitions have grown only more pointed.
Their calculus is simple. Despite campaign promises to improve working people’s lives, and Mr. Trump’s appeal among the rank and file, top union officials do not view the president, whose signature policy law benefits the wealthy, as a true ally of organized labor. And if Democrats regain the ground they’ve lost with blue-collar voters, many of whom are union members, it could help leaders with their own struggles, including flagging membership and criticism that they are losing touch with everyday workers.
But it is not likely to be easy.
The shift toward Mr. Trump among blue-collar voters last year was the culmination of a trend in recent elections: Democrats gained votes in wealthy, white enclaves, while Republicans earned new support in working-class regions and among Hispanic and Black voters, raising questions about Democrats’ longstanding identity as the defender of working people.
Union leaders, who mostly endorsed Kamala Harris even as many of their members scoffed at her candidacy, now find themselves trying to strike a delicate balance, maintaining support for Democratic candidates while not alienating members who voted for Mr. Trump. The conundrum is similar to Democrats’ own struggles to understand and court their lapsed voters.
“Every time we talk politics, the first thing that comes up is, ‘The Democrats let us down,’” said Jimmy Williams, the president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. His 140,000 members, he said, had split nearly evenly between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Williams said that he had been asking Democratic officials how they planned to win back his members but that he hadn’t “heard a coherent message that is enough for me to feel confident that the Democratic Party truly understands the pain that working people are feeling.”
Some labor unions have taken a more combative stance in an effort to cajole the party to act with more urgency. Others remain conciliatory, pushing from within to encourage the Democratic National Committee to improve its outreach to the voters who defected to Mr. Trump. (Two union leaders left their posts at the D.N.C. in June over concerns the group had become too insular.)
The D.N.C. declined to comment.
Other union leaders suggested that the party should support and fund campaigns by candidates who are not from wealthy backgrounds. And still others wanted to see more vocal opposition to parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda deemed damaging to the working class.
Some labor leaders were intent on better understanding their membership and avoiding the same criticism that Democrats themselves face: that they are out of touch with the average American’s priorities.
Dan Osborn, the independent Senate candidate who ran unsuccessfully against a Republican incumbent in Nebraska last year, and is now running for the state’s other Senate seat, said labor leaders needed to work harder to earn their members’ buy-in on political issues.
“They need to go out to job sites, not just mail something to their home and hope that they read it and understand it,” said Mr. Osborn, who for years was the president of a food processing union in the Omaha area.
Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said he and other leaders were working to reach their 1.1 million members, holding more than 70 virtual and in-person town halls around the country. The union has also turned to podcasts and influencers, using TikTok filters, connecting content creators with labor policy experts and collaborating on sponsored content.
The aim is to convince members that union-organizing is important and that Mr. Trump’s policies are bad for workers.
Members are “angry at both Republicans and Democrats, and we’ve got to hear them out,” Mr. Saunders said. “Clearly, they don’t want us jumping off right away saying, ‘All Democrats are good, and all Republicans are bad.’”
Mr. Williams’s trade union has a similar effort underway. Its “Building Union Power” campaign hopes to restore the trust among members that leaders believe has faded over the years, by traveling the country to educate workers about the history of the labor movement and the gains the union has made for workers.
“Some people only hear from their union around Election Day,” Mr. Williams said. “If they’ve had a negative experience or felt ignored, we’re going to hear them out and work to make it right.”
In Las Vegas, the 60,000-member Culinary Workers Union has a different approach. The union’s legion of cooks and waiters who campaign door to door are a key pillar of the so-called Reid Machine, the highly organized operation that delivered Democratic victories in Nevada for decades (and with a name that nods to the longtime Nevada senator Harry Reid, who died in 2021).
But conflict has been building in recent years, with the union especially angry that Democrats in the State Legislature helped end mandatory daily hotel room cleanings, a Covid-era safety measure, in 2023. Last year, the union withdrew its endorsement from more than a dozen Democratic candidates over their room cleaning votes, drawing a red line through their names on an endorsement guide.
And it ran two candidates in Democratic legislative primaries, a nurse who lost her bid to oust an incumbent Democrat and a food server and union member who defeated a candidate backed by party leaders.
Even as the union campaigned for Ms. Harris last fall, Ted Pappageorge, the union’s secretary-treasurer, repeatedly warned Democrats that they were not focusing enough on affordability and were poised to lose Nevada. In an interview, he suggested the party had not received the message.
“The No. 1 issue was the economy, and nationally, Democrats were tone-deaf about that,” Mr. Pappageorge said, adding, “If the candidates are all lawyers and developers and managers, then maybe that’s part of the problem.”
He cautioned that if Democrats did not promote more candidates who understand kitchen-table issues, the union would consider backing independents, Republicans or its own members.
The Nevada Democratic Party pointed to a list of bills aimed at raising wages and lowering prices that it had supported, even as its executive director, Hilary Barrett, acknowledged, “There’s much more work to be done.”
Above all, labor leaders said they must convince their members that Republicans are not a palatable alternative.
Republicans made overtures to working-class voters last year, earning particular support from the Teamsters. Both Mr. Trump’s labor secretary pick and his “no tax on tips” proposal, now a temporary deduction signed into law, were popular with unions.
But labor leaders said most of his actions since taking office, like ending labor protections for federal employees, showed that the outreach had been disingenuous. Mr. Trump’s policy law benefits the wealthy while cutting social safety net programs like Medicaid and food assistance.
“Trump kept on telling working people that he cared about them,” said Stuart Appelbaum, who heads the 50,000-member Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and is an associate chair of the D.N.C. “That was a fraud, but people unfortunately believed him.”
The White House downplayed the impact of food stamp cuts and tying Medicaid to work requirements. Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump had “delivered historic results,” including “increasing wages, codifying tax relief for hard-working families” and restoring domestic manufacturing jobs.
The disconnect between workers and leaders is not intractable. During the Biden-Harris administration, union support for Democrats spiked. But it had been falling in the years before that, and several labor voices described Mr. Biden’s term as only momentarily positive.
During Mr. Biden’s presidency, Democrats passed policies that helped working people, argued Randi Weingarten, the president of the 1.3-million-member American Federation of Teachers, and yet the pro-worker message “was not heard.”
“And if it’s not heard,” she said, “it’s as if it doesn’t happen.”