Much has been said in conservative media about the Teamsters' internal vote on whom to endorse for president this cycle, because it's such a break from the past 40-year history of political activity by a group of people numbering 1.3 million nationwide. Much also has been ignored about the Teamsters vote in regime media, because it's really a devastating piece of news for Kamala Harris' electoral chances coming down the home stretch. 

As two more national polls come out showing the contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump either tied or within 1 point, mitigating the outlier polls over the weekend by NBC News and CBS News, all outward signs point to another election that's going to be decided by a whisker, just as the 2020 cycle was. 

David Strom notes that Gallup has the party registration breakdown nationally favoring Republicans for the first time in a long time. How important is this metric? If past is prologue, very. 

Gallup track record is pretty scarily accurate on the national popular vote by tracking PARTY ID/LEAN... and look at what they predict for this election:

🔵 2008: D+8 (Obama+7.2)
🔵 2012: D+4 (Obama+3.9)
🔵 2016: D+3 (Clinton+2.1)
🔵 2020: D+5 (Biden+4.5)
🔴 2024: R+3 (?)

Just… pic.twitter.com/9mQnHRBDs8

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 24, 2024

Again, this is not scientific data, but compared to the 4.6% error rate over the last decade by the top 18 polling outfits tracked by Real Clear Politics, the polling by Gallup of the partisan makeup of the electorate this close to the election is within a point or so of what the final popular vote turns out to be. Pay particular attention to the 2016 and 2020 stats.

In 2016, Gallup had the country leaning Democratic by 3 points. Hillary won the popular vote by 2.1%, but got thumped in the Electoral College, with Donald Trump sweeping the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan to rack up a total of 304, 34 more than the 270 required to be elected president. In 2020, the Gallup number ticked up to D+5, with Joe Biden translating that into a 4.5% popular vote victory and an Electoral College win by literally a margin of 43,000 votes between Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania and Nevada were also razor-thin in their statewide margins as well. 

If Gallups R+3 number is within a point of where the final popular vote number is, as it has been for 16 years, Donald Trump will win the popular vote, and it will result in an Electoral College landslide. That's just how the math works. 

But let's get back to the vote last week by the rank-in-file Teamsters around the country. To say it caught union leadership flat-footed is an understatement. They couldn't go against two-thirds of their members and endorse Kamala Harris anyway, they couldn't in good conscience endorse Donald Trump, so they abstained. But the real telling data is when you look at the state-by-state breakdown of how the Teamsters have moved since the Democrats played the big shell game, substituting Kamala Harris in for Joe Biden. It's truly staggering.

🚨 2024 ELECTION ALERT🚨

While Teamsters is neutral, and national Teamsters polls swung around 32 points towards Trump after Biden dropped out, the battleground Teamsters are FAR WORSE for Harris.

Arizona (43 point swing)
🔵Biden: 54.4% (+24.6)
🟥Trump: 29.8%

🟥 Trump: 57.3%…

— America First Insight (@AF_Insight) September 23, 2024

The first number from America First indicates where Teamsters were on support for president when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee running for reelection against Donald Trump. The second set of data is how that same state voted last week now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee. The Teamsters do not like Kamala Harris even one little bit. They don't like her, they don't trust her, and they're not going to vote for her. 

Of all the individual states listed in this American First survey, I want to focus on Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin. In the Grand Canyon state, there has been a 43-point net swing towards Trump now that Biden has been cast aside and Harris has been installed as the nominee. What does that mean?

Arizona is a right-to-work state, and is among the lowest unionized states in the country. But there still are somewhere around 150,000 union workers as of 2023 data. Not nearly all are Teamsters, of course, but the Teamsters are a bellwether for private sector unions, just as the SEIU is the bellwether for public sector unions. In 2020, 3.33 million people voted for president in Arizona. Joe Biden's margin of victory was 10,457 votes. It's not going to take much to turn Arizona back to red from light blue, so when you see any individual voting bloc swing 43-points, it's worth noting. 

In Georgia, another relatively low union state compared to the rest of the country, still maintains a workforce that includes 200,000-plus members. A lot of them belong to the IBT. In 2020, Joe Biden won the Peach State by 11,799 votes statewide. How much has labor swung to Donald Trump since the the Kamala-for-Joe swap out? In a survey taken pre-July 4th, when Joe Biden was the nominee, the addled president enjoyed a 30.5% lead over Donald Trump with Teamsters. In the poll taken last week, Georgia Teamsters now favor Trump over Kamala Harris by 15.6%. that's a 46.1% swing. Even if Teamsters represented half of the state's union vote, it's not hard to see how that big of a swing applied to upwards of a hundred thousand voters reverses Biden's 2020 margin of victory, and then some. 

Finally, in Wisconsin, a state listing upwards of 204,000 union members, again, not all, but a large chunk of that number being Teamsters, movement among labor of any significance will greatly affect how the state votes as a whole. In 2020, in one of the thinnest margins of any state in the country, Joe Biden eked out a 20,700-vote victory. Teamsters in Wisconsin have moved towards Trump since the Harris switcheroo by 75 points. 

The Center For American Progress in late 2021, once the 2020 election was behind us and the data was all out there available for analysis, came out with a report on the impact of the union vote to the benefit of Democrats generally, and Joe Biden specifically. Here's their key takeaway.

Overall, union voters favored Democrats more strongly than nonunion voters in the past four presidential elections. The time series results in Figure 1 show that the union Democrat advantage remained roughly as large in 2016 and 2020 as it was in 2008 among employed voters, who overall showed a stronger preference for Democrats than the total voting population. Furthermore, even as the entire electorate shifted further to the Democrats in 2016 and 2020, the Democrat vote advantage among union voters kept pace, meaning that Biden performed the best out of the last three Democratic candidates among union voters. Rather than abandon the Democrats for Trump, union voters turned out for Joe Biden, the candidate who promised to “be the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen.”

Bottom line? Kamala Harris is underperforming Joe Biden with Teamsters. By up to 75 points, in some cases. She's underperforming Joe Biden with virtually every subgroup you can imagine - Black, Latinos, non-college educated, independents, seniors, even with suburban moms. 

There is an another interesting conclusion out of the Center for American Progress report. Again, CAP is is the central nervous system of the fever swamp body on the fringe left. I disagree with their politics and policy about 100% of the time. But they had a warning for Democrats in 2021, after this report crowing about how Big Labor came through big time in 2020 for Joe Biden - Don't take us for granted. 

Across most demographic groups, unions increased voter preference for Biden in 2020. This support could prove crucial to cementing Democratic support in upcoming elections. Union voters helped boost Democratic Party support among voters young and old, female and male, white and Hispanic. They helped Biden increase his advantage among a number of already Democratic-leaning groups, such as college-educated voters, and helped Biden remain more competitive among groups that Trump won, particularly the working class.

CAP Action’s new analysis shows that no voters can be taken for granted; they need to be recruited and retained. Unions help retain voters across demographics and educational attainment, which is why Democratic Party strategists and politicians should recognize unions’ importance and support policies to strengthen them.

If you look at Kamala Harris' stats, where she's losing ground with Latinos and with non-educated voters, those are overlapping Venn Diagram circles with union voters. The statewide data reflected in the Teamsters vote last week helps reinforce the other polling data of late showing the decay in support of Kamala Harris compared to Joe Biden. 

Add that into the mix of the Gallup survey of the election leaning Republican this close to Election Day? I would be very uncomfortable right now if I were on Team Harris.