Posted on 27 October 2010. Tags: 2010 Elections, AFL-CIO, Democrats, house, NAFTA, Republicans, Senate
This could be important in the scheme of things next week–the labor movement is holding its collective nose and helping out people who were less than helpful on key issues:
Big Labor’s big threat to punish misbehaving Democrats has largely evaporated in the heat of the midterms, as unions now scramble to rescue incumbents they once pilloried for opposing health care reform.
It’s a bitter, but necessary, political pill, considering that would-be Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in the House, has threatened to roll back many of the pro-union policies of President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — on pace to spend a record-shattering $90 million on the midterms — has begun a phone-banking, door-knocking, leafleting and get-out-the-vote effort for a handful of conservative Democratic House members the 1.6 million-member union once blackballed.
Aside from the regurgitation of the moniker "Big Labor" (which it isn’t once you get to less than 8 percent in the private sector), I found the article more instructive in the point it did not raise: if the labor movement had begun taking down Democrats twenty years ago who had gone off the reservation, would labor be in this position now? i.e., having to hold its nose and help truly bad legislators? Maybe yes, maybe no.
But, it’s worth asking: if every Democrat who had voted for NAFTA in 1993 faced a primary challenge, would the Democrats have actually lost the House in 1994? Meaning, people were furious back then–but I believe you can argue that many of the Republican victories in the 1994 elections came because of union voters who sensed that the then-Democratic president had sold them out by supporting NAFTA, because, after all, the labor movement correctly made defeating NAFTA a huge priority and a cornerstone of its internal political education efforts.
