Team Hillary were expecting unions to deliver. But instead the Reagan Democrat reemerged as the Trump Democrat. Unions are investigating what went wrong. But there's nothing to investigate.
Unions sold out their rank and file for big deals with the rest of the left. That meant jumping on the environmental and amnesty bandwagon even if it hurt workers. Then pile on ObamaCare and a war on coal and TPP and lots of other tensions and there was no actual reason for union members, as opposed to unions, to vote Hillary.
Controlling the machine doesn't mean you control the people. That's a lesson that the left always seems to have trouble properly learning.
Organized labor is searching for answers after union households failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton despite a massive voter mobilization effort -- a sharp departure from decades of union support for Democratic presidential candidates.
The assumption is that Donald Trump's positions on trade resonated strongly with union members, particularly those in blue-collar jobs. But union leaders are looking at exit polls for a deeper dive into the reasons.
Deeper excuses.
Nationally, Clinton outperformed Trump among union households by just 8 percent, the smallest Democratic advantage since Walter Mondale’s failed campaign against Ronald Reagan in 1984. For a more recent perspective, President Barack Obama won union households by 18 percent in 2012.
Clinton’s poor performance among union households appeared to especially damage her in crucial Midwestern states. Obama won Ohio in 2012, besting Romney in those households by 23 percentage points. Clinton actually lost Ohio’s union households to Trump by 9 points, according to exit polls. The state went to Trump.
The AFL-CIO’s political director, Michael Podhorzer, told POLITICO that Clinton “ran a really good campaign” but appears to have lost votes to third-party candidates. Indeed, exit polls showed Trump’s share of union households only rose by 3 percent compared with Romney in 2012.
Time to investigate deeper, bypass the obvious and blame racism.