Power At Work asked labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders to predict how union members would vote in the 2024 elections and the outcomes of those elections. They told us, and some of their answers delivered real surprises. Our respondents showed a shocking level of enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris’s young campaign for president, and for the idea that union members would support Harris when casting their votes. These labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders showed a little more equanimity when assessing this year’s congressional and gubernatorial elections.
Power At Work also asked our labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders to rank a long list of labor-related events that have happened so far this year based on whether they increased or decreased worker power. We will discuss these responses in Part 2 of this post next week. Part 1 -- this post -- focused on survey respondents’ views of the 2024 election. Read to the end to learn more about our respondents.
Respondents: Kamala Harris will be elected President with a large majority of union members’ votes
The world changed quickly and Power At Work tried hard to keep up. President Biden withdrew from the presidential contest one day before we distributed the Quarterly Labor Issues Survey. Vice-President Harris was likely to be the leading candidate for the nomination from the beginning, but it was not clear as we loaded our emails to send out the surveys that she would be the only candidate. This made crafting the survey’s questions about the 2024 elections more complicated. When asking respondents about the 2024 presidential election, we hedged a little bit: we replaced “Joe Biden” with “Kamala Harris or another Democratic nominee.” The analysis below will treat this answer simply as “Kamala Harris” since she is now the Democratic nominee.
Result - Harris Will Win: When asked who would win the 2024 election, our labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders showed an impressive amount of confidence in Vice-President Harris: 76% said the Vice-President would be elected President. Only 14% chose former President Donald Trump. The remainder declared they did not know. None of our respondents chose a third-party candidate.
It is worth noting that this enthusiasm is not the mere echoing of the public polls of the presidential race available during the survey period (July 22 to July 31). Harris is currently polling measurably better than Biden did against Trump, but most polls during the survey period still showed her behind or, at best, tied with Trump (the polls have shown Harris getting stronger against Trump since the end of July). But there is little question that labor activists supporting the Biden-Harris ticket felt a wave of relief and optimism once the Vice President commenced her campaign. In private conversations with national union political directors, I have heard numerous reports of increased volunteer activity and PAC contributions from union members. A rising number of grassroots union leaders want to attend the Democratic National Convention. Our respondents’ enthusiasm for Harris may have been lifted by that wave.
Result - Union Members Will Vote Overwhelmingly for Harris: Our labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders also predicted that union members would be much more likely to vote for Harris than Trump in 2024. In 2020, exit polls estimated that Biden won about 56% of votes cast by voters in households with a union member -- roughly 6% better than he performed with non-union households’ voters. Power At Work invited our respondents to choose the percentage of union-member votes Harris and Trump would win in November. Sixty-one percent of respondents predicted Harris would win between 50% and 70% of union members’ votes. Another 10% predicted her union member vote total would be between 70% and 80%.
By contrast, 56% of respondents predicted Trump would receive 20% to 40% of the union member vote for president. An additional 17% expect Trump’s union vote to total between 40% and 50%. In all, more than 4-in-5 respondents put Trump’s expected union-member vote share to be below 50%. Our labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders expect Harris to win the union vote in a landslide.
Biden won early endorsements from the AFL-CIO and a large number of unions, both AFL-CIO- affiliated and not. When Biden exited the race, the labor movement acted very quickly to endorse Harris. Only a small number of the endorsements were official before the end of our survey period, but it was not hard to tell even then that all the pro-Biden unions would also endorse Harris. Of course, union endorsements do not translate into universal union member support. Union members are diverse ideologically, demographically, and geographically. Most important when considering unions members’ likely vote choices, unions represent some populations of voters that lean more toward Trump than Harris, like white men without college degrees. Nonetheless, union endorsements educate, persuade, and get-out-the-vote of union members. Plainly, our labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders believe that unions’ immense enthusiasm for and quick endorsements of Harris will translate into Harris substantially improving on Biden’s 2020 union vote share.
Respondents: Democrats will take control of the U.S. House, but the races for the U.S. Senate and Governors’ Mansions Will Be Competitive
Result - Democrats Will Win the House: A majority of our labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders predict that Democrats will win control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2024. That’s an accurate reflection of the common wisdom among political observers right now. Republicans currently hold only 220 seats in the U.S. House, which would constitute a two-vote majority if all the House’s seats were filled (there are currently three vacancies). With the race at the top of the 2024 ballot closer than it might have been if Biden remained the Democratic candidate, House Democrats are more likely to win so-called “front-line” districts -- that is, districts where the congressional candidate from one party and the presidential nominee of the other party both won a majority in 2020. In addition, redistricting in a number of states may help Democrats eke out additional seats that alone could be sufficient to ensure a slim House majority. In other words, our respondents’ collective prediction jibes with the surrounding data and information.
Result - Unclear Who Will Control the Senate: Our labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders were much less certain about who would control the U.S. Senate after the 2024 election. Currently, Democrats control the Senate with the votes of 47 Democratic senators and 4 Democratic-aligned independent senators. Forty-five percent (45%) of our respondents predicted Democrats would have a majority in 2025, while 22% predicted Republicans would win a majority, 14% predicted a 50-50 tie, and another 18% understandably admitted they do not know.
Our respondents’ collective uncertainty on this question accurately reflects the difficulty of assessing how this election will turn out, and perhaps a little bit of irrational exuberance about Democrats’ chances. Simply, it will be very difficult for Democrats to keep control of the Senate. Democrats will almost certainly lose a seat in West Virginia with the retirement of former-Democrat-turned-independent Senator Joe Manchin. There are highly competitive Senate races in five states represented by Democrats: Ohio and Montana, which can be expected to vote for Trump for president, as well as Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan, which are all presidential “swing states.” Senate candidates can and often do win more votes than their parties’ presidential nominees, especially when senators have the benefits of incumbency. In fact, some of the Democratic senators who represent Republican-leaning states have won this way in the past. But convincing voters to “split the ticket” is not easy, and the election can come down to how many voters must be persuaded. The ticket-splitter well can run dry.
There are no states currently represented by Republican senators where Democrats have a reasonable likelihood of winning. Perhaps if you squint your eyes and tilt your head, you can see a way that Democrats could defeat Republican Senator Rick Scott in Florida, but the odds are not good. In sum, after taking West Virginia out of their column, Democrats must sweep the five elections in states they currently represent to achieve a 50-50 tie in the U.S. Senate. The Vice-President would cast the vote giving them a majority, if Vice-President Harris and Governor Tim Walz win. It feels like Democratic control will require a three-cushion bank shot in pool, but it is by no means impossible. A Democratic majority seems much harder.
Result - Republicans Will Keep a Majority of Governors: Finally, our labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders brought a cold-eyed realism to their assessment of the governors’ races in 2024, although a sizable 27% of respondents declared they did not how these elections would turn out. Republicans currently hold 27 governorships and Democrats control the remaining 23 governorships. There are 11 gubernatorial elections in 2024. Party-switches are highly unlikely in almost all these states, and our labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders made their predictions accordingly: 49% predicted Republicans would retain a majority among governors, 17% predicted Democrats would secure a majority, and another 6% predicted a 25-25 tie.
Only two of the 11 states that are “in cycle” in 2024 seem to have genuinely competitive gubernatorial elections where a party-switch is possible: North Carolina, which has a Democratic governor, and New Hampshire, which has a Republican governor. Alone, these two elections would not be enough to change the partisan balance. So, our respondents’ near-majority choice of “Republicans” seems like a prediction that the likeliest outcome will come to fruition.
Who Are the Survey’s Respondents?
This is a survey of labor insiders and knowledgeable outsiders, not a poll distributed to a representative sample from across the labor community. So, Power At Work does not present these results as a window into the views of the larger labor community. Nonetheless, it offers a valuable snapshot of some labor insiders’ and knowledgeable outsiders’ collective assessments of the 2024 election and worker power issues in the United States.
Respondents’ Occupations: Power At Work continued to attract the kinds of survey respondents we wanted for the second Quarterly Labor Issues Survey. Twenty-six percent (26%) of respondents are union members or staff. The same percentage identified themselves as a “union leader.” So, more than half of the people responding to the survey are leading, active in, or working for unions. Another 8% identified themselves as “worker advocates.” We increased our representation of teachers/scholars/academics at any educational level from the first survey’s 10% to this survey’s 14%. Only 4% of respondents self-identify as leading or working for a think tank. Only 1% are journalists, which likely makes sense since this survey addressed political issues about which journalists are supposed to be neutral. We were pleased that 4% of respondents self-identified as students.
Respondents’ Home Region: Respondents live and work in all parts of the country. The Northeast and West were somewhat overrepresented in the first survey’s group of respondents, so we succeeded in reducing their share to 36% and 12% respectively, while increasing representation in the Midwest (24%) and South (22%). The Southwest’s representation remained essentially flat. We want the broadest representation possible from across the country, so we have to continue our efforts to expand participation.
Respondents’ Age: For the first time, we asked our respondents their ages. We were surprised by the result. Roughly one-third of our respondents identified themselves as 66 years old or older. Another 40% identified themselves as 46 to 65. Only 4% identified themselves as 18-to-25 years old, which was very likely our student respondents. The remainder are ages 26 to 45. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a sizable percentage of older respondents. It may not be surprising that labor leaders and academics are going to skew somewhat older, or that people over the age of 65, if retired, would have more time to complete Power At Work’s survey. Nonetheless, this is not quite the degree of diversity we would like among our survey respondents. As we have done with geographic diversity, we will endeavor to include younger respondents moving forward.
Conclusion
The Power At Work Quarterly Labor Issues Survey (Q3 2024) tells us that the labor community and people around it were extraordinarily enthusiastic and optimistic about Vice President Harris’s campaign for the presidency when they submitted their responses, but more measured and responsive to the news and polling around the other big elections in 2024. Any survey or poll is merely a snapshot of opinions at that time. We cannot say whether the enthusiasm reflected in this survey will continue through Election Day, or perhaps grow. As of this writing, Vice President Harris's campaign has been going well. Will it continue? That’s beyond the scope for Power At Work.
In Part 2 of the analysis of the Quarterly Labor Issues Survey results, we will address the labor-focused questions we asked of our respondents:
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Which of the following have been the most important events increasing worker power and strengthening unions in 2024 to date?
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Which of the following have been the most important events decreasing worker power and weakening unions in 2024 to date?
We think you will find these results fascinating. Watch for our post one week after this post is published.
One last word: the best way to ensure you have an opportunity to participate in the next Quarterly Labor Issues Survey, and to keep up with all the great content on Power At Work, is to subscribe to the Power At Work Blog today. Go to the front page of Power At Work and subscribe right now!
