His decision to not endorse is resulting in the local unions ancross the country endorsing and actively campaigning, especially in swing states, like Pennsylvania. His performatively giving a standard lukewarm endorsement would not have accomplished that.
There are significant portions of the rank and file who may have been meh before that are now feeling righteously pissed.
Some Democratic strategists say the outpouring of local endorsements for Harris could be more important in influencing how Teamsters turn out to vote than the national union’s decision to abstain. Local unions typically mobilize members directly through workplace conversations, door-knocking, leafleting and mailers.
Union politics is ultimately local and retail too. The paradox is the national union abstention may mobilize the ground game better.
I agree - there were enough downticket politicians, that they coulda given the Teamsters a few minutes, if that woulda garnered an endorsement.
Your second paragraph reminds me of when I lived in NW IN. All the R steelworkers who happily went on and on about the horrible unions - except theirs, of course!
Thanks for posting this. I hadn’t seen it. I’m embarrassed to admit I teared up. I’ve never been so tense about an election, and I was plenty tense about the last two. I can’t figure out why the election is so frickin’ close at this point. Trump has shot himself in the foot so many times, he’s wearing Swiss cheese shoes, yet none if it matters. Harris is sane, smart, knowledgeable and experienced. It’s not like Beavis is running against Butthead.
Just consider how many people wear Crocs; Swiss cheese shoes are appealing to some folks. There’s no accounting for taste in footwear or which politician you support.
Yeah. And his followers are having to get better and better at tying themselves into mental knots, in order to excuse him.
Donald keeps saying that October 23 is “too late,” ignoring the fact (surprise!) that dozens of modern-day Presidential debates have been held in late October—one on the 28th (in 1980) and three on the 22nd (in 1976, 2012, and 2020).
The Dems need to start running ads with chickens on the soundtrack.
The two main poll modelers (538 and Nate Silver) have generally shown a discrepancy with 538 leaning more Democratic by several percent. Today they are very close.
The wry answer is that he is getting support in sympathy for the blood gushing from his shoe. But the cold hard reality is that the words we are hearing are ShitGibbon ShitGibbon ShitGibbon Harris Harris Harris. His name is freaking everywhere, all the time. Even she talks about him. He is a raving publicity deluge while she is calm and underexposed. That is entirely why it looks to be so close, and she needs to step in front of him and portray that he is irrelevant and not worth talking about (while not actually ignoring him herself).
One of my Trump neighbors has put out a ton of Halloween decorations, and in the middle of it a Trump sign where he has a bloody ear and is raising his fist. No sense of irony whatsoever.
We’re still the only Harris sign on the block despite it being more blue than red. I wonder if people feel intimidated.
Pretty sure this is because Silver’s model factored in a post convention bounce that Harris didn’t get. That part of the model didn’t really make sense given the circumstances of this election, but it is basically faded now.
This may belong in the polling thread but as the election nears they each progressively give less weight to their own differing “fundamentals” of the race (their punditry) and become more purely poll based. They then will tend to converge.
The Chicago convention went so well, and the pivot from Joe to Kamala so smoothly, I really thought she’d get a noticeable bounce in the polls. Too bad.
