How Did Labor Do in the 2010 Election?

by Jo Freeman

Labor unions poured an enormous amount of money into the midterm elections, as well as a lot of labor to get out the vote. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which analyzes data obtained from the Federal Election Commission, of the 1.5 billion dollars spent on the Congressional races in the 2010 election, 3.9 percent was donated by labor unions. Twenty percent of the top one hundred non-party donors were labor unions. They gave almost $52 million to Democratic candidates and $3.6 million to Republican candidates. The rest was independent spending.

Labor is also a big contributor of campaign volunteers. While this kind of support isn’t reported any place, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told ABC News that the “Labor 2010 member-to-member mobilization included 30 million phone calls, 20 million pieces of mail and 5.1 million knocks on union family doors.”

In 2009, the last time the Bureau of Labor Statistics took a count, 15.3 million people — 12.3 percent of all wage and salary workers — were members of a union. Over half of these are public sector employees. This percent varies enormously by state. New York has the highest rate of unionization with 25.2 percent of wage and salary workers, and North Carolina has the lowest with only 3.1 percent in unions.

According to the exit polls for the midterm elections, on average only 61 percent of union households voted for the Democrat, while 37 percent voted Republican. This is near the bottom of the normal range for the last 20 years. Since 1980, the percent of union households voting Democratic has ranged from 60 to 68 percent in both midterm and Presidential years. However, since the last 60 percent vote in 1994, the percentage voting Democratic has been at the lower end of that range.

This is consistent with the slow drift of the white working class (not all of whom are union members) out of the Democratic Party. Indeed the percent of union households voting Democratic has held up as well as it has because of the growth of public sector unions such as AFSCME and SEIU.

The national data hides a lot of state variation, but only a few states had enough respondents in the exit polls to separate out the union household vote. In Ohio 24 percent of 2010 voters told exit pollsters that someone in their household was a union member, although only 14.2 percent of its 2009 wage and salary workers were union members. Of these union household voters, 70 percent voted for the Democratic candidate for Senate in an open seat race and 67 percent voted for the incumbent Democratic Governor. Both Democrats lost. In 17 House races, none of which were open seats, five Democratic incumbents lost, while all of the Republican incumbents were re-elected.

Ohio is a rustbelt state which has been hit hard by the Great Recession, but it was also one in which organized labor invested a lot of resources. Data is not yet available on how much money labor spent in Ohio, but the AFL’s Andy Richards told the Toledo Blade that the Ohio AFL organized 4,500 three-hour volunteer shifts, made 500,000 phone calls and knocked on 75,000 doors in support of Democratic candidates for state and national office.

Thanks to all this work, the turnout of union household voters was good in Ohio (even though the results were dismal), but this was not true everywhere. According to Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress the union household share of the total vote was down from 2008 and 2006. Apparently a lot of union members, like many others on the liberal side of the political spectrum, voted by staying home.

©2010 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com