After Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris announced on August 6 that union label Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz would be her running mate as she campaigns for the U.S. presidency this fall, top Big Labor bosses’ response was immediate and ecstatic.
For example, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain, the head of a 400,000-member union so corrupt that in 2020 it acquiesced to the installation of a federal “ethics” monitor in order to avoid a complete government takeover, commended Mr. Walz for “standing with the working class.”
Unfortunately for the Harris-Walz ticket, as well as for its Big Labor cheerleaders, most actual working-class voters in Minnesota and nationwide evidently don’t agree at all with Mr. Fain’s assessment.
As political analyst Michael Baharaeen pointed out in an August commentary for The Liberal Pundit, in originally winning the Minnesota governorship in 2018, Mr. Walz fared even worse with the Gopher State’s working-class voters (i.e., voters without a bachelor’s degree) than had Hillary Clinton in 2016.
(Though Ms. Clinton won Minnesota’s 10 electoral votes, Donald Trump shellacked her among the state’s working-class voters, 55%-38%!)
In 2022, according to Mr. Baharaeen, Mr. Walz performed still worse with this segment of the Minnesota electorate. In all but three of the state’s heavily working-class rural counties, his vote share fell by five or more points.
“The plain fact is, powerful union bosses who rake in impressive incomes because of their special monopoly privileges, of whom Shawn Fain is one, and working-class voters in the Midwest and across the U.S. have radically different values,” noted National Right to Work Committee Vice President John Kalb.
“For example, nonpartisan polls show that the vast majority of working-class Americans support school choice programs that make money directly available to parents to spend on alternative schools or educational paths for their children, in case government district schools aren’t meeting their needs.
“This is a common-sense concept, which the vast majority of all registered voters support.
“But Big Labor virulently opposes school choice, because it effectively breaks up school districts’ education monopolies.
“In 2019, Tim Walz proved his fealty to the union brass, and teacher union bosses in particular, by quashing bipartisan efforts to adopt a school choice program. But that was just for starters.
“In the late spring of the following year, working-class parents and other parents of children attending K-12 government schools were fed up with the COVID-19 ‘remote learning’ experiment that had been foisted on them several months earlier by teacher union bigwigs and their allied politicians.
“A late May-early June 2020 nationwide Gallup survey of parents found that over 90% of them wanted their kids to attend in-person school, full-time or part-time. Just 7% wanted to continue with 100% ‘remote learning’ as a means of combatting the spread of the COVID-19 virus!
“But powerful teacher union officials in Minnesota wanted government schools to stay shuttered 100% of the time, and those were the people Mr. Walz listened to.
“His administration imposed mandatory statewide conditions for school reopening that were stringent and medically unwarranted.
“Mr. Walz thus consigned vast numbers of kids and parents to additional months of ‘remote learning.’”
Right to Work President Mark Mix emphasized that political pandering to Big Labor on issues like school choice and extended school lockdowns isn’t popular with any type of voter.
“The reason Big Labor lickspittle politicians like Tim Walz have lost more ground with working-class citizens than with others is because the nearly 60% of voters without a bachelor’s degree are more apt to choose candidates based on their day-to-day concerns than the rest of the electorate,” suggested Mr. Mix.
“For example, the vast majority of potential voters in this fall’s presidential race are unhappy about the fact that the overall inflation rate under Biden-Harris has been roughly three times as high as under Trump-Pence, and that real weekly pay has fallen under Biden-Harris as a consequence.
“I am confident that, whoever wins the upcoming presidential election, most working-class voters will punish Ms. Harris and her running mate for the current administration’s economic failures.
“The only way the Harris-Walz ticket can win is by racking up a substantial majority of votes from non-working class citizens who are focusing on issues other than workers’ take-home pay, educational opportunities for schoolkids, and the Right to Work!”
This article was originally published in our monthly newsletter. Go here to access previous newsletter posts.
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