You would think that the disrespectful tone of comments from leading Democrats like the anonymous Senior White House staffer would have ended Tuesday night. Unfortunately, those comments did not.
They continued through yesterday when Chuck Schumer put working men and women on the same level as Wall Street CEOs by holding up two fists and said of her primary campaign: "Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other."
Senator Robert Meneddez, tasked with leading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee further rubbed salt in the wound by boasting that:
Tonight Arkansas Democrats nominated Blanche Lincoln, a proven independent voice for her state. In this race Blanche took on powerful special interests in Washington and won.
Right after calling them a special interest, he stated regarding Labor: "I expect both their support on the ground and I expect their support, you know, financially."
What Senators Schumer nor Menendez might not realize is that when it comes to getting Democrats elected, no group has delivered as strongly as the working men and women of the Labor Movement
An article in today's Politico by Vic Fingerhut (Labor-dissing Dems, think again) and statistics taken after nearly every Presidential and mid-term election back this up.
In the article, which Fingerhut said I could copy from at will as well, he went back as far as 1960, noting that:
Consider that, despite his charisma, John F. Kennedy would have lost the presidency without the labor vote. Probably by something close to a landslide, perhaps 8 to 10 percentage points.
That alliance, which got Kennedy narrowly elected, goes back to the ealry days of the New Deal, when an energized and growing labor movement gave Democrats huge advantages in Presidential and Congressional elections and kep the Congress in Democratic hands for all but four years from 1930 to 1994.
In fact, the one thing Republicans did when they did take power briefly in the 1950s was to curtail the ability of workers to organize, knowing full well that the Labor Movement was their biggest obstacle in their path back to power.
Fingerhut argues that the instant Democrats betrayed their allegiance with working men and women, like Bill Clinton did with NAFTA, the party took a major hit that it only recovered from after benefitting from the worst Presidency in modern American history:
Between 1930 and 1994, Democrats had control of the House of Representative 60 out of 64 years. The Republicans had control for four.
Indeed, the most recent time — prior to the Clinton years — that the Republicans won the House in two consecutive elections was 1926 and 1928 — the two congressional elections before the Great Depression.
Beginning with the first congressional election after Clinton took office, the GOP went on an incredible roll — its longest in more than three-quarters of a century. It won six successive House elections, 1994 to 2004.
So much for Clinton’s legacy to the Democratic Party. Perhaps political centrism is not such a great idea for the party.
One thing about labor unions is that union members provide giant 30-40 point margins in support of Democratic candidates throughout almost every demographic group.
For example, post-election polls show that in 2008:
•Obama won among white men who are union members by 18 points, while losing that group by 16 points in the general public.
•Obama won among union gun owners by a 12-point margin, while losing that group in the general public by 25 points.
•Union veterans voted for Obama by a 25-point margin. He lost among that group in the general public by nine points. (Source)
In fact, Fingerhut adds that according to the numbers,
Indeed, for every million-person decline in union membership, the Democrats could lose a potential 700,000 votes — not counting spouses, children and other family members, who often end up with similar voter loyalties.
It's not a coincidence that states where unions are weak happen to be the ones that are the most reliably GOP while those with higher levels of union density vote consistently Democratic.
Even if the media pundits and Democratic leaders don't see it, you can be sure the GOP does and is why they went all out to defeat measures like the Employee Free Choice Act which, if it had been passed, probably would have wiped the modern conservative movement off the face of the Earth as the GOP would have had to rely on moderates to get elected, as they did for the most part back in the 1950s. One of those Republican moderates, Dwight Eisenhower, stated that "only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of their right to join the union of their choice." You've got to wonder how much more foolish it is for some in the the party that is supposed to be sticking up for workers are instead sticking a fork in their eyes instead.