arberagl01: Republican attack on unions costing them big with Republican-leaning union members

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Republican attack on unions costing them big with Republican-leaning union members

Video: Firefighters and Police marching in a pro-union rally in Wisconsin

One of the main reasons Republicans are facing a strong backlash over their attempts to bust public-sector unions is that many members of public sector unions are?or at least were?Republicans. As these normally Republican union members hear the candidates for whom they voted attack them viciously and try to take away their collective bargaining rights, they are turning away from Republicans in large numbers.

This is especially the case among firefighters, police officers and the building trades:

Chuck Canterbury, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his members are ?shocked? by the turn of events.
?Who are these evil teachers who teach your children, these evil policemen who protect them, these evil firemen who pull them from burning buildings? When did we all become evil?? said Canterbury, whose union endorsed Bush in 2000 and 2004 and John McCain in 2008.

He is traveling the country to rally FOP members to rise up against anti-labor laws in their states or in support of their colleagues in other states. ?There is going to be a backlash,? said Canterbury, a former county police officer in South Carolina. ?We are going to hold them accountable.?

The backlash is not just anecdotal, based on the notable presence of firefighters and police officers at rallies in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Numerically, the union-member turn against the GOP is the primary reason why Scott Walker has seen his popularity plummet. From PPP in late February (emphasis mine):

We'll have our full poll on the Wisconsin conflict out tomorrow but here's the most interesting finding: if voters in the state could do it over today they'd support defeated Democratic nominee Tom Barrett over Scott Walker by a a 52-45 margin.
The difference between how folks would vote now and how they voted in November can almost all be attributed to shifts within union households. Voters who are not part of union households have barely shifted at all- they report having voted for Walker by 7 points last fall and they still say they would vote for Walker by a 4 point margin. But in households where there is a union member voters now say they'd go for Barrett by a 31 point margin, up quite a bit from the 14 point advantage they report having given him in November.

Further, the shift is not just limited to Wisconsin:

According to a November Hart Research poll, 55 percent of all union members said they were Democrats, and 25 percent were Republicans. Among building trade unions, however, just 47 percent were self-described Democrats, and 25 percent said they were Republicans.
But by the time the new House Republican majority arrived in Washington in January shouting a mantra of spending cuts rather than the campaign slogan of jobs, the percentage of trade union members who called themselves Democrats jumped to 63 percent while the self-described Republicans fell to 18 percent ? and that was before the Wisconsin and Ohio collective-bargaining fights went from rumors to the nation?s front pages.

Roughly 12% of Republican votes in 2010 came from self-identified union households. That is a pretty significant percentage of your base to piss off. A 10% increase in Democratic support among union households would represent a 3.4% shift in the national poplar vote, half of the 6.8% Republican margin in the 2010 national House vote.

The five main demographic pillars of the Democratic coalition are non-whites, non-Christians, single women, union members and the LGBT community. While it's an extremely difficult to maintain cohesion among such a heterogeneous array of groups, Republican attacks make that task a whole lot easier.