Short on Time, Harris’s Labor Allies Sprint to Reach Working-Class Voters

Unions and their affiliates think they can still break through with the Democrats’ worst demographic, white working-class voters, by hustling on the ground. But it has been a slog.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s allies in organized labor have begun a late drive to help her with white working-class voters, her weakest demographic, in the face of great skepticism over inflation, old grudges about free trade, new ones about student-loan forgiveness, and a profound blue-collar affinity for Donald J. Trump.

Working America, a political affiliate of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. built to reach nonunion workers, has around 1,600 paid canvassers knocking on doors in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on any given day — just one part of a concerted effort by organized labor to eat into Mr. Trump’s advantage and deliver a Democratic victory through sheer hustle.

“We are the difference-makers in the election,” said Liz Shuler, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s largest federation of unions.

But beneath the bravado is realism.

For Ms. Harris, there is no sugarcoating her numbers with white working-class voters. Earlier this month, a poll of Pennsylvania by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer found the vice president leading Mr. Trump overall, 50 percent to 47 percent. But Mr. Trump led by seven percentage points among likely voters without a college degree.

Among white voters without a college degree, that gap grew to a chasm: 58 percent favored Mr. Trump, 40 percent Ms. Harris. By a wide margin, 57 percent to 41 percent, college-educated voters said Ms. Harris would be better than Mr. Trump at helping the working class. But if educational attainment is a stand-in for class, the white working class trusts Mr. Trump; 56 percent say he would help them best, compared with 41 percent who say that about the vice president.

April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, said Democratic hand-wringing over a slight slippage of support among Black men misses the real problem.

“It is white men and white women who vote for Donald Trump. We’re not going to sway the majority of them, but over time, we have to tackle that challenge,” she said.

The working class’s issues with Ms. Harris are complex and, with less than two weeks until Election Day, probably not remediable. As Zaeveona Rainey, 25, a canvasser and crew chief for Working America, made her way last Thursday through Coraopolis, Pa., a mostly white working-class suburb of Pittsburgh, she found very few voters who were not already dug in.

Older working-class voters still associate the party with the free-trade principles of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, an association emphasized by Mr. Trump’s protectionist takeover of the Republican Party, said Michael Podhorzer, who recently retired as the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s longtime political chief. Many younger working-class voters, crushed economically by the coronavirus pandemic, then hit by inflation just as they emerged from isolation, appear to have given up.

“Most young working-class people, for good reason, think Democrats, Republicans or the political class have done nothing for them,” Mr. Podhorzer said. “People don’t trust the system.”

But as Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, sees it, there are voters to reach with a large enough army. He has a theory to drive the canvassers blanketing the swing states — that the personal connections they make night after night will make a difference.

“It’s a numbers game,” Mr. Morrison said. “You get to enough people on a large enough scale to get to the soft commits or undecideds.”

And union leaders say they are making the effort, while acknowledging the headwinds.

“I want to stress, we still have work to do,” said Lee Saunders, president of the 1.6-million-strong American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and chairman of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s political committee, “especially in the economic areas.”

Mr. Trump may be just getting better advice, said Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and the executive director of a nonprofit media organization, More Perfect Union, aimed at working-class viewers.

When the former president talks about going into a drugstore and finding all the products behind locked plastic plates, he is almost certainly not speaking from personal experience, Mr. Shakir said. Yet Mr. Trump’s story of crime and decline is instantly relatable and recognizable to voters in a way that Ms. Harris’s refrain of growing up middle class somehow isn’t, he argued.

The Harris campaign believes it has a winning strategy for winning enough working-class votes in the closing days of the campaign, through union hall visits by Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, labor surrogates leading the outreach, and advertising strategically placed in college and professional football games and other major sporting events.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Ms. Harris told union workers in Lansing, Mich., on Friday, “Donald Trump’s track record is a disaster for working people, and he is an existential threat to America’s labor movement.”

Organized labor insists it can break through. On Saturday, a coalition of industrial and service-industry unions began a final push that their leaders say will reach five million union members. Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers, has become one of Ms. Harris’s most trusted surrogates, barnstorming through Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Public sector unions, such as AFSCME, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, may have their existence at stake: The Trump allies who wrote the Project 2025 blueprint for another Trump term, have vowed to phase them out.

More than 5,000 S.E.I.U. members would be knocking on more than a million doors in the final drive to get out the vote.

Mr. Morrison portrayed chipping away at Mr. Trump’s advantage almost as a science, and he brandished the numbers to prove it. Through follow-up call and control groups, he said Working America concluded it had netted 250,000 additional votes for Democratic candidates in 2022, 90,000 of them for John Fetterman, the victorious Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, 21,000 for Katie Hobbs, now the governor of Arizona.

On a recent day in Pittsburgh, around 250 canvassers had come up from Atlanta to supplement the Pennsylvania crew set to blanket the working-class suburbs south of the Ohio River. At a training session that afternoon, they were advised to highlight Ms. Harris’s policies, and not to try to convince people Mr. Trump is bad.

Be personable and memorable, they were told. If voters identify themselves as Trump supporters most concerned about immigration, move on. They are set. If a Trump voter says he is most concerned about health care, lean in. That person could flip.

Ms. Rainey did not find many of those “soft commits.” There was Michael Carden, 42, a meat cutter in what he called “a very blue-collar job,” who told her on Thursday evening that he was adamantly for Ms. Harris.

“I’ve thought a lot about who I am and what has become of us since 2016,” he said. “What Trump brought out in people, it’s made me think a lot less of a lot of folks.”

But Trump supporters had their own reasons. One cited President Biden’s “giveaway” to college graduates who have had student loans forgiven. A 55-year-old landscaper who declined to give his name liked Mr. Trump’s swagger and unpredictability in an unstable world.

“It’s like having Mike Tyson walking behind you,” he said of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy.

If nothing else, Working America has been good for the Americans working for it. Base pay for a canvasser is $20 an hour, $25 for a canvasser working five days a week. If a canvasser records 33 completed conversations a night, that can be bumped to $30 an hour. A completed conversation is simply getting through four questions: What is your top issue? Which presidential candidate are you voting for? Which Senate candidate are you voting for? Would you accept a Working America for Harris yard sign?

“Human connection is what drives the outcome,” Mr. Morrison said.

Even some of the canvassers have their doubts. Maria Wesley, 54, a door-knocker who came up from Atlanta with dozens of others to help in Pennsylvania, said she had been breaking down wooden pallets for $14 an hour before connecting with Working America. “For a lot of us, this is the most money we’ve ever made,” she said.

But if she doesn’t make her average of 30 conversations a night, she can be dismissed, which once happened to her, and the bosses are diligent about random checks to make sure canvassers are truthful in their reports. That can drive canvassers to rush through their scripts — or “raps” — instead of really working to change minds, Ms. Wesley said.

Still, every once in a while, the canvassers connect. At the end of her night, as darkness enveloped Coraopolis, Ms. Rainey found Victor Martinelli, not exactly working class. He retired at 63 from his job as tax director at a venture capital fund. But he was genuinely undecided. Ms. Harris had the better economic agenda, he said, but he saw Mr. Trump as the better commander in chief in a world edging toward war.

As he talked through his concerns with Ms. Rainey, he seemed to lean toward Ms. Harris. “She does have a plan,” he allowed. “At least she is telling us what she wants to do.”

He thanked Ms. Rainey for stopping by and talking it through: “It just gets you thinking,” he said.

Jazmine Ulloa contributed reporting from Saginaw, Mich., and Ruth Igielnik from New York.