With a blizzard of nearly 60 tweets and retweets on Wednesday, Trump attacked the leadership of a national firefighters’ union after it formally endorsed Biden, calling it “this dues sucking union,” and the president retweeted dozens of individuals claiming to be firefighters who support him.
It seemed a clear sign that Trump, who made inroads with rank-and-file union voters in 2016, especially in the industrial Midwest, was anxious about their loyalty. His Twitter posts — like an earlier attack on a United Auto Workers local president in Ohio — attempted to set rank-and-file union members against union leadership.
“Clearly he’s very worried about Joe Biden and the unions,” said Rick Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, which has not endorsed any candidate.
In his first campaign speech on Monday, at a Teamsters building in Pittsburgh, Biden thanked a litany of unions, from teachers to steelworkers to carpenters, and declared, “I make no apologies: I am a union man.”
Trump’s campaign indicated it intends to hire an aide focused on union outreach, and the president himself has wooed some moderate national labor leaders, but any slippage he suffers with this blue-collar constituency could prove politically fatal next year: He was elected by only the narrowest of margins in a handful of states in the industrial Midwest.
What worries the president’s aides about Biden, according to people familiar with their thinking, is that his moderate profile and deep ties to labor could win back many of the voters who twice backed him and former President Barack Obama before spurning Hillary Clinton.
“Start right here in Pennsylvania and work your way up through Ohio, Michigan — that’s going to be the battleground and I think they come home,” Harold Schaitberger, the head of the pro-Biden national Firefighters union, said earlier this week in Pittsburgh.
The firefighters, who did not endorse any candidate in 2016, were sending an early signal that the former vice president would have labor support in a way that had eluded Clinton.
At an appearance in Iowa on Wednesday, Biden did not talk extensively about labor but alluded to Trump’s early-morning Twitter barrage.
“I understand the president’s been tweeting a lot about me this morning; I wonder why the hell he’s doing that,” Biden said with a hearty laugh, adding, “I imagine I’m going to be the object of his attention for a while, folks.”
He later added: “You know who built the middle class? Unions. Unions. Let me say it out loud.”
Trump’s challenge with labor could only grow steeper if he does not sign an infrastructure bill, a long-promised priority of his and many industrial unions. The prospect of a massive public works program is keeping the building trades unions on the sidelines right now, according to multiple labor officials, but if Trump does not deliver on this multibillion-dollar promise it would effectively give them permission to line up with a center-left Democrat like Biden.
The president and his Republican allies point to record low employment to claim that American workers have never done better, and that the president deserves re-election.
By retweeting dozens of Twitter messages purporting to be from active or retired firefighters who said they support him, Trump was exploiting a Democratic vulnerability with organized labor: While union leaders almost exclusively endorse Democrats, many rank-rand-file members vote Republican.
The Trump 2016 candidacy exposed this discrepancy. Internal polling released by the AFL-CIO showed Trump won 3% more union voters than the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, while Clinton won 10% fewer voters than President Barack Obama in 2012.
Rank-and-file union workers, especially in industrial fields, have defected from their historic allegiance to Democrats over social issues like gun rights and abortion, and in 2016 Trump won many of their votes while promising to crack down on trade deals and illegal immigration.
But in midterm elections in November, Democrats in three key states Trump carried — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — improved on their 2016 performance, winning every statewide office.
In Michigan, where Trump won 40% of voters from union households in 2016, the Republican candidate for governor carried only 36% of union households last year, according to exit polls.
John Russo, a retired labor studies professor at Youngstown State University in Ohio, said Trump’s strategy of appealing to the rank-and-file “plays into a resentment many workers are feeling about their position in society and their companies and their own future.”
But Russo said the ardor for Trump by blue-collar workers appears to be diminishing in places like northeast Ohio, where the economic picture has worsened despite Trump’s promise in 2017 to workers not to “sell your houses” because jobs were coming back. “He kept promising all these new jobs,” Russo said. “What’s happened is it’s getting worse in northeast Ohio.”
In March, Trump seemed to blame the president of a United Auto Workers local in nearby Lordstown, Ohio, for a decision last year by General Motors to close an assembly plant there. Trump responded by posting on Twitter that the union president “ought to get his act together and produce.”
A few days before Biden visited Pittsburgh, workers at ATI Allegheny Ludlum’s steel mill in Washington, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, had mixed reactions to the president’s economic performance. In 2017 Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel to boost American jobs, but the record is mixed.
Chad Martin, a 36-year-old worker, heading from the parking lot to clock in for the swing shift, dismissed Biden’s message that he was labor’s best friend. “That’s old-school thought,” he said. “That’s what my dad thinks. He’s in his 50s. He’s a Democrat — union.” Martin said he became a Republican in his 20s when “I started thinking for myself.”
It was clear that many other rank and file workers also support the president. A worker named Mark, who declined to provide his full name, used an expletive to describe Trump, but said he was doing a good job. “He can’t keep his mouth shut,” he said. “But look at the economy. I just started working here three months ago, I’m making the best money of my life.”
Clark Jungo, 59, an inspector who has worked in the mill for decades, said the Trump tariffs hurt this mill. “We do specialty steel here,” he said. “It’s hurt us.”
Jungo was a Biden supporter. “He’s the dominant Democrat,” he said. “He’s our man.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.