Election
2004
by Dave Riehle
This article is addressed mainly to readers in the
The
just-concluded presidential election is now grist for the mill of the pundits
and professors who are happy to tell us what it really meant. As if the nearly
two-year-long presidential campaign wasn’t punishment enough!
The dominant theme of the editorial page
wiseguys is that “moral values” were the touchstone of the voters, and that
“social conservatives” prevailed. An important, and ominous, underlying message
(let us assume that in this case the wish is father to the thought) is that
organized labor has lost its ability to influence its constituency.
According to this version, the old blue-collar
Democratic Party of FDR and Harry Truman has been
replaced by an effete cadre of peace-mongering, gun-hating, and gay-marriage-promoting
urban liberals. The union leaders, the pundits say, are out of touch with their
members. The union leaders supported John Kerry, the losing candidate, and the
banner carrier for such irrelevant concerns, which equals, in this analysis,
four political flat tires for labor. The fact that Kerry’s positions on these
and other issues were virtually indistinguishable from those associated with
President Bush does not deflect these “analysts” from their appointed
conclusions.
A closer review of election statistics now and
in the past, I believe, presents another picture with far different, and far
more optimistic, implications and possibilities for labor.
The larger assumption in the pundits’ pundificating is that in every election the voting (and nonvoting)
public presents a clean slate to the candidates, to be filled in with “moral
values,” or some other slippery category. This is a gross oversimplification,
not to say an outright distortion of the actual dynamics of voting in the
First, the truth is that both major parties have
large and relatively stable blocs of voting supporters. That is why they are
“major parties.” In recent decades the outcome of presidential elections has
been determined by a shifting “center” of 5–10%, often less, with the major
parties retaining their core support election after election. Most of these
generalizations about what the election “meant,” then, concern the
preoccupations and moods of an unstable and numerically marginal “center” group
whose votes are influenced by factors like “moral concerns,” mostly
manufactured out of whole cloth by the media, the politicians, and the big
money behind them. Of course the size of this “center” vote fluctuates up and
down by degrees along with whatever portion of the eligible electorate actually
turns out to vote, usually between 50–60% nationally. The “center” could easily
be outvoted if one of the Big Two got another 3–5% of their regular supporters
out to vote. That was obviously organized labor’s strategy. The AFL-CIO reports
that 24% of the electorate this time around were union members—double the
representation in the population at large—while the Republicans sought to
sandbag those they saw as potential Kerry voters, and to whip up their latent
“moralists” to get out and vote down gay marriage.
The big engines in elections, however, remain
the two major parties and their permanent supporters. Underlying this rather
obvious factor are others, more related to economics and class that should
especially concern the labor movement.
Let’s look at
What do these counties have in common, other
than that they are all in
Let’s try putting on a labor filter and taking
another look. Each of these six counties has an exceptionally strong union base
among its population, and, more than that, they have generations-old traditions
of labor political action.
The Twin Cities urban areas, besides having the
state’s largest concentration of union membership, also contain by far the
largest minority groups, both in terms of percentage and absolute numbers.
Among African Americans, the proportion of union membership is nearly double
that of the majority population, and the mass institutions
that enroll African Americans—union, civil rights, religious—are usually
closely aligned on social and political issues.
Then there is
Other counties with a similar pattern are Winona
and Blue Earth counties, anchored by the regional centers of
Surely these counties, both heavily urbanized
and rural, did not vote in their majorities the way they did because of some
harmony of outlook on “moral values,” religion, the Second Amendment, or, it is
probably safe to say, the war in
What these votes expressed is the impact of
those sectors of the population most influenced by the recommendations of the
labor movement (and certain farm and agricultural organizations as well), and
the broader sections of the population that they in turn affect. This is not to
say that other factors did not impinge on the outcome of the election, too. A
large and active stratum of urban liberals weighed in heavily for the
Democrats, especially in the Twin Cities. And a substantial number of workers
and union members voted for Bush.
The AFL-CIO reported, for example, that Kerry
lost nationally among white men by 61–38%, yet among white male union members
he carried by 21%. In the Black metropolis of
The
Much has
been made, for example, of the remarkable conformity of a map of the pre-Civil
War free and slave states to an overlay map of 2004 voting patterns—the states
that went for Kerry are almost an exact duplication of the free states and
territories of 1860, and the old South and the territories that were open to
slavery went to Bush. This is in fact quite a striking juxtaposition of images,
and, further, one that is not accidental. But what does it mean? That the South
is more “backward”? That it is less educated?
Not
really. It reflects the more circumscribed influence of the labor movement in
the former Confederacy. Looking at a national map of 2004 election patterns in
the deep South, it is obvious that a majority vote for Kerry—that is, the vote
the unions campaigned for—is focused primarily in two areas: along both banks
of the Mississippi River as it flows between Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana,
and Mississippi, where petro-chemical and other unionized industries are
concentrated, and through the industrial and mining belt in central Alabama,
again an area with a history of industrial unionism extending back through the
last century. Kerry’s counties in
The
problem in the South is not that they are dumber than we are. The continuing oppression of Black and white
labor (the South is uniformly “Right-to-Work”) is expressed vividly in the
statistics for union density (the percentage of union members among the
employed nonagricultural population). In
By
contrast, in
In terms of labor strategy it is crucial to
realize that the working class voting pattern discussed here is only superficially a “”Democrat” vote—rather
it is a class and trade union vote,
that is, a vote that follows the recommendations of organized labor. What has
diminished it in terms of exacting electoral majorities is not the weakening of
the ability of organized labor to influence its constituency, but
de-industrialization.
The class nature of 20th century
voting by workers (and working farmers) is very clear especially when viewed
through the lenses of Minnesota’s unique political history, because the
dominant party among workers in this state for 25 years during the middle 20th
century was not the Democratic Party—it was the Farmer Labor Party (FLP). Only
after the unions participated in the merger of the Farmer Labor Party into the
state Democratic Party during World War II did workers shift their political
support.
In 1932, when the FLP’s
Floyd B. Olson swept to victory in the governor’s race (the same year Franklin
Roosevelt was first elected), the Democratic gubernatorial candidate got only
16.1% of the vote cast. This was the consistent pattern from 1919, when the
Minnesota State Federation of Labor struck out on the third party path by
creating the Working People’s Non-Partisan League. For the next quarter century
the Democrats were a feeble third-place party, rarely getting over 10% of the
vote in statewide elections.
So which is the tail and which is the dog? Who
is the wagger and who is the waggee?
It should be quite clear, to borrow another animal metaphor, that without
organized labor the Democratic Party would be a dead donkey. Yet, although
labor is formally independent of the Dems, most in
labor are convinced that labor can only prosper if its
political “friends” (Democrats mostly) are in public office. “Reward your
friends and punish your enemies,” recommended Samuel Gompers, the master of a
pungent phrase.
But the problem is, our
enemies are punishing us, and our
“friends” are standing by with folded arms, as we hope, pray, mobilize, and
vote for a savior to lead us out of the wilderness. If there is one thing that
ought to be clear from the election, it is that is not going to happen.
Labor’s fate has always been decided on the
picket lines and in the streets, by workers muscling in on the prerogatives of
the bosses. Back in the late 1930s the New
Yorker magazine ran a famous, and often reprinted
cartoon, as a wave of worksite occupations rolled across the country after the
great victory by the autoworkers at
What we need more than ever is a movement, confrontational, aggressive,
and inspirational. History, properly understood, should teach us that course of
action won’t isolate us, which is what they want us to think—it will bring the
unorganized to their feet. And the outlines of it are right there on the
election map, if looked at through the right prism. The best-kept secret of
Election 2004 is not that “