Betrayal is a powerful emotion, especially at the ballot box. Voters who feel betrayed tend to act like spurned lovers, punishing the offending party even if it means electing somebody who will actually be worse.
That’s how America got Donald Trump as president. Many blue-collar workers in factory towns in battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — who were once pillars of the Democratic Party — voted for a man who promised to rip up free trade agreements, which they blamed for the loss of manufacturing jobs. It didn’t seem to matter to them that Mr. Trump had no track record of standing up for workers or that employees at his hotels faced union-busting tactics when they tried to organize.
More important was using their votes to punish Democrats for abandoning the working class.
Joe Biden understood that, and in 2020 he set out to atone for the sins of the Democratic Party by promising to be the most pro-union president ever — a promise he has kept. It’s not just that he became the first sitting president to join a picket line. It’s not just that he appointed the most pro-union National Labor Relations Board since the 1930s, as the labor historian Jeff Schuhrke told me. It’s all the things his appointees are doing behind the scenes.
Mr. Biden’s National Labor Relations Board, for example, handed down the Cemex decision, which makes it easier for workers to win collective bargaining rights against employers. Thanks to that ruling, companies must act in a timely manner to either recognize a union or allow workers to vote on whether to form one. Companies that delay — a common tactic used to crush organizing — will be ordered to recognize the union and start bargaining with it as if it had won a vote. That requirement will be invaluable to the United Auto Workers as it pursues an audacious plan to unionize 150,000 autoworkers at Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and other factories around the country.
The Biden administration even fights for the rights of workers abroad when they are violated by American companies. Just this month, the Labor Department successfully pushed Goodyear Tire & Rubber to pay $4.2 million in back pay to more than 1,300 workers in Mexico. Instead of asking American workers to accept less to compete in the global economy, the Biden administration is trying to make sure workers abroad get more. That’s not easy, but it’s an inspiring use of American power.
Union leaders are obviously paying attention.
Will it make a difference to the rank and file? I asked that question in Michigan, a must-win state where unions hold tremendous sway, and got conflicting answers.
Antoine McKay, an actor who is appearing in an August Wilson play at the Detroit Repertory Theater, told me that it “absolutely matters” to him that Mr. Biden supports unions and joined workers on the picket line. Mr. McKay is a member of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which conducted a successful strike last year. “I think workers in our society are encouraged on every level because of the strikes that have happened and the outcomes of those strikes,” he said.
But other interviews suggested that Mr. Biden is not going to be rewarded.
Brooke Davis, who works at the MGM Grand Detroit casino and participated in her first strike this year — she’s a U.A.W. member — told me she’s not sure whom she would vote for in the fall. People had to stand in the cold during the strike, she said, sometimes with their children, and live on $500 a week of strike pay, a small fraction of what they usually made. She said she appreciated the benefits they won but didn’t relish doing it all over again in 2028, in a general strike that the U.A.W. is planning.
She said that the G.O.P. seemed more practical and more forward-looking. “You might not always like what they’re saying,” she said of the Republicans, “but you know where they stand.” Democrats “are always trying to sell us hopes, sell us dreams” about solving health care and student debt, she said. It sounded good, she said, but they seemed to promise more than they could deliver. Ms. Davis is a Black woman and a union member — two constituencies that Democrats leaned on heavily to win the state in 2020. It’s not a good sign that she’s undecided.
The most devastating assessment came from Merwan Beydoun, a former crane operator at a steel mill in Dearborn who once served as vice president of bargaining for his local unit. As a former U.A.W. representative, he said, he knew how important Mr. Biden’s policies were to unions. “I loved it,” he told me, when the president showed up at the picket line in September.
The following month, Hamas brutally attacked Israel, and Israel began its assault on Gaza. Mr. Beydoun, who is of Lebanese descent, is furious at Mr. Biden for his unwavering support of Israel’s government as it flattens neighborhoods, killing thousands of children, in what he called “genocide” and collective punishment. He and his Arab American community voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. Now, he said, they felt deeply betrayed.
Mr. Beydoun used to encourage his conservative co-workers to cast their ballots for Democrats, arguing that however they felt about abortion, gun rights or gay marriage, their first allegiance should be to the union. But he has stopped telling people that. In fact, he’s planning to not vote for either candidate in November. He even canceled his contribution to the U.A.W.’s political action committee after the union endorsed Mr. Biden. If Mr. Trump would win as a result, he said, “so be it.”
I pressed him on it. Wouldn’t Mr. Trump be worse for Palestinians? Didn’t Benjamin Netanyahu want his buddy Mr. Trump re-elected? Mr. Beydoun paused.
“There’s something to be said for that,” he said. But he stood firm.
Voting makes sense only if there’s a chance that your vote will matter, and he had no hope that either party would change American policy on Israel. “Whether it’s a Republican or Democrat, I know they’re going to stand by Israel 100 percent,” he told me.
The biggest way to make his voice heard, he insisted, was to withhold his vote. “We need to make a statement to say, ‘Hey, we can do this to you.’”
That’s the politics of betrayal. There are lots of voters like Mr. Beydoun in the metro Detroit area, which is crucial to any path to victory for Mr. Biden in the state. Wayne County, the most populous in Michigan, is home to both the United Auto Workers International headquarters and the largest Arab American community in the U.S. Thousands of Arabs settled here in the 1960s and ’70s and got jobs in the Ford plants, including Mr. Beydoun’s father, who came from Lebanon in 1968, beginning a decades-long tradition of political activism through their unions.
Today there are 190,000 Arabic speakers in Wayne County alone, out of about 1.8 million people. Dozens of elected leaders in the area have signed a pledge to vote uncommitted in the Feb. 27 primary in Michigan as a signal of their willingness to abandon Mr. Biden unless the administration changes course.
Now the White House is scrambling to show that it values Palestinian lives after initially questioning the Palestinian death toll in Gaza and calling demands for a cease-fire “repugnant.” Last week, senior administration officials traveled to Dearborn and expressed regret, according to a leaked recording of the meeting. And the president called Israel’s operation in Gaza “over the top.” But those words will be seen as empty unless they are accompanied by policy changes, especially a call for a permanent end to hostilities.
In an interview, James Zogby, a founder of the Arab American Institute, said that it was difficult to motivate Arab Americans to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because her supporters had rejected efforts to add language to the Democratic Party platform calling for an end to “occupations and illegal settlements.” She still won Wayne County by about 290,000 votes — but that margin wasn’t enough to make up for losses elsewhere. She lost Michigan by fewer than 12,000 votes. (Her campaign also suffered from her association with free trade, which Bill Clinton championed in office.)
In 2020 the insults of Mr. Trump’s Muslim ban and his State Department’s neglect of the problem of stateless Palestinians were fresh in the minds of Arab American voters. The Biden campaign wooed them by issuing its Arab American Agenda, which said that the president “opposes annexation and settlement expansion.” Mr. Biden won Wayne County by more than 332,000 votes, a margin that helped him carry Michigan by 154,000 votes.
“I hear this from people in the White House — ‘They’ll come around in November,’” Mr. Zogby told me. “It’s demeaning, and it’s dangerous. It ignores the depth of their feelings.”
Can new positive energy from unions make up for the feelings of betrayal over Gaza? I’m skeptical.
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