Organized labor’s political power has declined dramatically over the past half century. Union density has fallen from more than 30% of the workforce in the 1960s to less than 10% today — and labor’s footprint in campaign finance has shrunk in parallel. Meanwhile, the historic bond between unions and working-class voters has frayed. In 2024, more than 40% of unionized workers reported voting for Donald Trump, and Teamsters president Sean O’Brien’s appearance at the Republican National Convention made the depth of this realignment impossible to ignore.
Unions have responded with a wide range of revitalization strategies: ballot initiatives, new worker organizations, labor-aligned third parties. Yet one promising approach has received surprisingly little attention — the deliberate recruitment, preparation, and election of candidates who come from the labor movement itself.
This report argues that union candidates are an untapped political resource. Using original quantitative analysis of congressional candidate data from 2010 to 2022 — drawn from the Center for Working-Class Politics’ database of candidate websites — alongside 20 in-depth interviews with union-affiliated elected officials and labor leaders, it documents what union candidates do differently, how rarely they run, and what unions can do to change that.
To understand the contemporary role of organized labor in US elections, we analyzed campaign finance data covering congressional races from 1996 to 2022. We tracked the share of donations flowing from labor PACs to candidates over nearly three decades, broken down by party, incumbency status, and candidate background.
To measure the prevalence and political behavior of union candidates, we scraped campaign websites for all congressional candidates between 2010 and 2022 and identified those who reported union membership, leadership, or organizing experience — producing an original database of candidates with union backgrounds. We then…
Auteur: Editors
