'Not good enough anymore': Union leader explains why Dems lost economic argument to Trump

07 November 2024

The consensus among pollsters is that President-elect Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election was largely due to voters trusting him more on economic issues. One union leader who campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris is now weighing in on why he thinks Harris failed to convince voters that she was best suited to oversee the economy.

In a thread posted to X (formerly Twitter), Jimmy Williams — who is general president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) — lamented that a second Trump term would be "disastrous for my members." He wrote that he traveled across multiple Rust Belt states lobbying his union's 140,000-plus members to get behind Harris in the months before Election Day, and got a keen understanding of why her message failed to penetrate to blue-collar workers.

"VP Harris got a stronger percentage of union voters this election than President Biden did in 2020. But she still lost!" Williams wrote. "That’s because the Democratic Party has continued to fail to prioritize a strong, working class message that addressed issues that really matter to workers. The party did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Donald Trump."

"That’s not good enough anymore! Rather than offer a positive agenda on what immigrant workers bring to our country, they bought into the punitive, 'tough,' anti-worker messaging that is championed by Trump, even though we know it’s the bosses’ fault," he continued.

As Williams pointed out, Harris' failed gambit to bring moderate Republicans into the Democratic Party "big tent" partially relied on her outspoken support of the conservative immigration reform bill that failed to pass through the U.S. Senate in 2023. The bill's chief author, Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), celebrated it as "by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades." Had it passed, it would have severely restricted the asylum application process and allowed the president to shut down the border to all migrants if illegal border crossings passed a set threshold each week.

Meanwhile, income inequality soared under the Biden administration, even as real (inflation-adjusted) wages for American workers continued to outpace price increases, inflation steadily fell back to 2021 levels and interest rates leveled off. In These Times reported in March that the United States' 737 billionaires saw their own individual net worths soar from $2.58 trillion to more than $5.529 trillion over the last four years. But for ordinary Americans, median household income didn't recover to pre-Covid levels until September of 2024.

In his thread, Williams tweeted that workers' frustration with high prices erasing wage gains persisted, and that Democrats didn't do themselves any favors by downplaying Americans' economic concerns during Biden's tenure in the White House.

"[Democrats] failed to address inflation, saying that it wasn’t a big issue or that the pain that working people feel right now isn’t real," Williams tweeted. "So while we were able to get many of our members out to vote for VP Harris, many other workers went with Trump."

The problem may ultimately be with messaging: While Williams argued that Democrats "failed to address inflation," Biden publicly celebrated every time inflation rates dropped, including when he accomplished what's known as a "soft landing" in which high inflation returns to normal levels without a corresponding spike in unemployment rates. In August — after he had already dropped out of the 2024 race — Biden chided the White House press pool for not properly informing Americans that his economic agenda was delivering tangible results.

"I told you we were gonna have a soft landing," Biden said at the time. "My policies are working. Start writing that way, OK?"

"Trump was able to build a stronger coalition of voters and may very well wind up with a Republican trifecta. This will be disastrous for my members," Williams concluded in his thread. "Working people deserve a party that understands this, one that puts them first and places their issues front and center."

Click here to read Williams' full thread on X.

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