Earlier today, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) released the results of a poll that showed a clear majority of Teamsters supporting Donald Trump. Just an hour later, the union announced it would not be endorsing any candidate for US president.
Many Teamsters are breathing a sigh of relief that the union didn’t endorse Trump after general president Sean O’Brien made an appearance at the Republican National Convention and after these polls indicate a fairly Trump-sympathetic membership. Others will be disappointed that Trump didn’t win the endorsement after the membership was polled. Still others will insist that the polls are rigged and that they should be discounted.
To some extent, those who take issue with the polls are not wrong. For instance, the original straw poll was conducted from April 9 through July 3 in union halls and was organized entirely by local union leadership. From anecdotal evidence, it seems that only a small minority of locals took time to mobilize and educate their membership on these votes, the stakes of the election, and the meaning of the polls. As a result, mainly active and engaged members (who tend to lean Democrat) showed up. This poll indicated that members backed then Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden 44.3 percent to Trump’s 36.3 percent.
Immediately following this poll, the IBT leadership announced another poll, this one online, that would supplement the in-person straw poll. There was a lot of speculation that this online poll was commissioned to counteract the results of the straw poll. There is no way of knowing whether that is true, but its results do indeed contradict the straw poll’s results. This poll went heavily for Trump. Conducted between July 24 and September 15, members voted 59.6 percent for Trump and only 34 percent for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
This pattern itself — a wild swing from Biden to Trump — doesn’t actually tell us very much. In fact, it…
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Auteur: Dustin Guastella
