It’s a debate with national implications that labor
unions love and the tech giants that created
the on-demand delivery industry loathe. It also
marks a fresh test of organized labor’s relevance
and strength in the age of Donald Trump, who
won the presidency in part by peeling away
working-class voters long loyal to Democrats in
a handful of pivotal Midwestern states.
But in 2020, just as the nature of labor is
changing, so too is the notion of the “labor vote.”
Voters in many traditionally union-dominated
manufacturing areas were once a reliable
Democratic constituency, but they have
gradually drifted to Republicans, driven more
by cultural issues such as guns, abortion and
immigration than by wages, benefits and
pensions. Union members also are shrinking as a
total of the overall vote.
Still, in states with growing service and public
sectors, labor has shown it is still capable of
mounting large, influential campaigns on
the minimum wage, health care and workers’
rights. Democrats largely have fallen in line,
risking blowback from donors and voters in the
powerful tech industry.
“It says something about where the candidates
think the primary voters are on this issue,” said
Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Democratic supervisor
in Los Angeles County who now works at the
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. They “may
believe that labor can be more helpful to them
than the high-tech companies can be to them in
a caucus state or a primary.”
From its earliest days, the 2020 Democratic
primary has highlighted the renewed power of
organized labor in presidential politics.