With a blizzard of nearly 60 tweets and retweets 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.
Since announcing his candidacy last week, Biden has repeatedly invoked his decades-long bond with organized labor. In his first campaign speech 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. He has twice held events at local facilities of the International Union of Operating Engineers, and last month in Texas he made the case to Jim Callahan, the union’s president, for why they should back his re-election, according to a Trump official briefed on the conversation.
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 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 International Association of Fire Fighters, said earlier this week in Pittsburgh.
The IAFF, 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.
Still, most unions are unlikely to follow the IAFF with such an early endorsement, letting the primary race play out as many of the 20 announced Democrats pursue them. Some unions, such as those for teachers and nurses, are more liberal than industrial workers unions and feature many supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others.
Beth Allen, communications director for the Communications Workers of America, which represents 700,000 workers in the United States and Canada, said there was no particular groundswell for Biden among the union’s members, and that the union has seen enthusiasm for a variety of candidates.
“Nothing is wired this time,” said D. Taylor, who runs UNITE Here, a hospitality industry union. “We’re going to let our members and leaders listen and take it all in and then have a discussion. Let’s see how it shakes out this fall.”
Taylor — whose union includes the culinary workers in Nevada, the most muscular political group in that early-voting state — said he has heard from nearly every one of the major Democratic candidates but not from Trump.
Biden has long-standing relationships with many national and local labor leaders because he was often their de facto liaison in the Obama administration.
“Biden would actually give you a fair hearing,” said Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers. “When there were issues, you’d go to the vice president. So he has a reservoir of goodwill.”
Next week, Biden is planning to join a teachers union rally in Los Angeles.
Still, some labor leaders have said privately that they want to see if Biden’s early polling lead can hold up before they step into the race.
Biden has purposefully provoked Trump in his first days as a candidate, attacking the president on everything from free trade to a decline in American values. On Wednesday, Biden did not even bother feigning anger at the president’s online outburst, believing that it elevates his stature in the Democratic race to wage a days-long fight with a president his party loathes.
“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 laugh, adding, “I imagine I’m going to be the object of his attention for a while, folks.”
The president and his Republican allies point to record low unemployment 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-and-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’s union support slipped by 10% compared to Obama in 2012.
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.
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.
In March, Trump seemed to blame the president of a United Auto Workers local in Lordstown, Ohio, for a decision last year by General Motors to close an assembly plant there. Trump posted on Twitter that the union president “ought to get his act together and produce.”
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.
A few days before Biden visited Pittsburgh, workers at ATI Allegheny Ludlum’s steel mill in nearby Washington, Pennsylvania, 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 steelworker, 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 a Democrat.” 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.”
But Clark Jungo, 59, an inspector, said the Trump tariffs had hurt. “We do specialty steel here,” he said. “And it worked against 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.