Last Tuesday’s historic elections have shifted the United States substantively towards the center left. The Democratic party is on track to have at least 54 seats in the Senate and will probably have 55 or 56 seats once the counting is done. They will likely end up with as many as 260 seats in House. In Texas, where I live, almost the entire state level leadership flipped. We’ll soon have Gina Hinojosa as Governor and James Talarico as Senator.
There is lots of post-election analysis floating around. I’ll be offering something for the European Center for Populism Studies next week on the role religion played. In the meantime, I wanted to put a perspective out there that I’ve not yet seen much of–the role the labor movement, specifically the United Auto Workers (UAW), played in the Blue Tsunami.
Corey Robin, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and one of the most perceptive commentators on United States politics, penned a persuasive piece almost as soon as the results were in. Titled “Last night was Mamdani’s night,” he lays out how Zohran Mamdani helped lay the rhetorical foundation for many Democratic victories. He writes:
If there’s one person who saw yesterday’s repudiation of the right coming, long before everyone else did, it’s Zohran Mamdani. In one way or another, he and the movement that created him are the architects of the Democrats’ victory.
Robin’s a brilliant scholar and I assume that he has the receipts to fully back up his argument. Assuming he does, then the shift in United States politics that we just witnessed can be traced, in part, to the decision of UAW to back Mamdani in his run for mayor of New York City. The union was the first major union to endorse him.
At a time when many of New York’s large unions lined up behind Andrew Cuomo or stayed neutral, UAW came out hard for Mamdani. They coordinated over 1,000 volunteer shifts for his primary campaign alone and pour resources into his election effort. UAW President Shawn Fain made a video endorsing him.
Such an endorsement was not a foregone conclusion. A decade ago the UAW was one of the more conservative of the big unions. It was firmly in the hand of a group called the Administrative Caucus, which opposed direct elections of the union’s leadership and routinely endorsed milquetoast establishment Democrats and sold out UAW members with management friendly contracts. The caucus lost control of the union 2021 in a process that involved federal intervention over corruption and a rewriting of the union’s governance. It got more democratic and moved towards direct elections for its leadership, a development that allowed Fain, who had spent his career on the shop floor rather than in union administration, to win the presidency. Since then the union has moved steadily to the left.
I don’t know if the UAW’s endorsement of Mamdani was the decisive factor in his win and ultimate influence on United States politics. It is impossible to prove counterfactuals. What I do know is that it likely made a substantive difference in his campaign and by extension the change in political rhetoric and platforms we have just witnessed.
The union’s influence on Tuesday’s election did not stop there. It played an important part in Senator Elect Abdul El-Sayed primary win over the execrable Haley Stevens. Like Mamdani, he offers a clear analysis of what must be done to push out authoritarianism, push away inequality, and push up standards of living.
If you’re happy about all of this I suggest that you consider thanking the UAW, President Fain, and the union activists who made his election possible. They helped both El-Sayed and Mamdani along the way. They are all very much proof that the labor movement still has the capacity to shape United States politics.
