It was a viral moment for a campaign that needed one: A chorus of boos greeting JD Vance as he spoke to a roomful of union firefighters in Boston, the same group that had warmly greeted Tim Walz a day earlier.
But it was a fleeting moment for Walz and Kamala Harris. Despite the reception at the August convention, the International Association of Fire Fighters last week declined to endorse either candidate in the presidential race — a snub of the Walz-Harris campaign that underscores a much larger problem for the ticket. The move completely blindsided the vice president’s team.
Harris and Walz, despite their longtime labor ties, are struggling to win over key rank-and-file union members — part of a major political realignment away from the Democratic Party.
Democrats’ waning influence with unions, especially industrial, male-heavy groups like the firefighters and Teamsters, has been a major point of concern for Democrats since Harris took over the ticket from Biden, who was widely hailed by union leaders as a staunch ally of organized labor.
To fill that void, Harris, who has a strong pro-labor record but few personal ties to the country’s unions, has leaned heavily on Walz to help bolster the ticket’s labor appeal. On the campaign trail, the governor frequently talks up Harris’ role in the “most pro-union U.S. administration in history” under Biden.
In addition to the UAW, Harris and Walz are backed by the influential International Brotherhood of Electric workers. And, when Biden dropped out of the presidential race on July 21, the governor was on the phone with top labor leaders less than 72 hours later, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees President Lee Saunders, to get their read on his future prospects. Walz later addressed the group’s national convention as Harris’ running mate and helped to secure the support of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
But even Walz, with his strong union credentials, is facing his own skeptics among working-class men. In interviews, many blue-collar, male voters who aren’t enthused about Trump don’t often appear to be strongly swayed by Walz’s folksy charm.
Harris-Walz campaign aides downplayed Walz’s role in the non-endorsement, saying he wasn’t part of the official negotiations with the union over a possible endorsement.
“While Donald Trump tried to cut funding that keeps firefighters and communities safe, Vice President Harris has always stood with firefighters and always will,” Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said.
Harris’ team is still hoping to secure endorsements from local firefighter union chapters, especially in key swing states, in a similar effort that followed the Teamsters snub last month. Minnesota firefighters did roll out their endorsement for Harris and Walz shortly after the IAFF vote last week.
But earning wide support from firefighters in swing states won’t be easy for Democrats, who must now contend with union members who overtly support Trump, and who are willing to push their leadership away from Harris.
Case in point: In the weeks leading up to the firefighters’ union declining to endorse, union officials were telling Walz allies, Harris aides and other Democrats that their support was essentially locked in, according to five union officials and the three other people familiar with the matter. But at least a week before the vote, union officials knew the endorsement was slipping away from Harris, or likely already gone.
But the union president, Edward Kelly, was under intense pressure by key local chapters — including New York, Boston, Philadelphia and some officials in Los Angeles and Houston, along with a swath of rank-and-file members — to withhold endorsing Harris, with some threatening to pull out of the larger union if it did. Some chapters followed through on threats to leave the union after it endorsed John Kerry in 2004, and the IAFF declined to endorse in 2016. The pressure this year was even higher.
Several union officials said they believed Kelly ultimately didn’t want to endorse a candidate this cycle with the organization so politically divided.
While union officials thought the IAFF board had the votes to endorse Harris earlier in September, and a plan to vote around Sept. 21, on Sept. 30, the union’s new board members (who had been elected in August) took office — including a more pro-Trump official who replaced an outgoing pro-Harris official representing Texas and Oklahoma, according to three other union officials who were directly involved in the conversations. It was just enough to push the endorsement out of reach for Harris. Three days later, Kelly announced the union, by a razor-thin margin, voted to not endorse any presidential candidate.
“This decision, which we took very seriously, is the best way to preserve and strengthen our unity,” Kelly said in a statement shortly after the vote.
During the closed-door vote last week, Frank Lima, the No. 2 IAFF leader who hails from California and knows Harris well, made the motion for the board to endorse the vice president and Walz, according to four union officials familiar with the meeting. But anti-Harris board members banded together to swing the results against her, including some who had argued against endorsing the vice president over her border policies that they argued were allowing fentanyl into the country and making firefighters unsafe on the job. So while she won a voice vote, she lost the final, binding vote by 1.2 percentage points. “It’s like winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college,” remarked one of the union officials, who was present for the board vote.
The IAFF declined to comment beyond Kelly’s initial statement on the vote.
Harris and Walz’s strong pro-labor record appears to have limited sway over firefighter endorsement discussions at the state level, too.
In Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Harris, the state firefighters’ union has already decided not to issue its own presidential endorsement. Robert Brooks, who leads the group, said it has “never made an endorsement in a Presidential race” and “will continue with that practice and rely on the International Association of Firefighters to handle that.” Brooks also didn’t think any locals in his state would make their own endorsement.
In Michigan, another key swing state, the firefighters’ union is still holding internal meetings to decide whether they want to issue their own endorsement. Matt Sahr, who heads the state union, attended Harris’ campaign event at a firehouse outside Detroit last Friday and spoke one-on-one with the vice president about firefighter policy issues after her speech.
“We’re still trying to navigate through it, and we recognize that we have a diverse membership with diverse opinions, but one thing we stand firm on is that we support candidates who we think are best for labor,” Sahr said in an interview. “As a union, we don’t get involved in the social issues, we stick to the labor issues.”
In battleground Wisconsin, Mahlon Mitchell, who heads the local chapter of the state’s firefighters union in Madison, a blue stronghold, is a IAFF board member and voted to endorse Harris in the vote last week. Mitchell, also a 2024 DNC delegate who ran for governor in 2018, leads the larger Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, with 4,000 firefighters and paramedics across the key swing state.
But the Wisconsin union under Mitchell is still soliciting feedback from members before they can decide whether to put a presidential endorsement to a board vote. If it does, union members in the state expect the result to be a narrow vote to back Harris, according to three state-level union members familiar with the matter, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
But, other members are hesitant to start a fight over endorsements.
“The [union] board needs to sit and have a discussion on it, to weigh out the pros and cons,” said one person familiar with the internal conversations, who was also granted anonymity to discuss them candidly. The person noted the rank-and-file in the state skews Republican, “even though the labor leaders typically align more Democratic.”
In an interview, Mitchell said he hadn’t pressed his state board or any locals to endorse Harris, but confirmed: “I voted to support Vice President Harris for the simple fact that she’s — in my opinion — going to be the best for our jobs.”
“We’re going to work through our process and see what comes out of that,” he added.
Jim Hoffa, the former longtime Teamsters president, said in an interview he believed his old group’s non-endorsement last month was “a big mistake” and displayed “a lack of leadership.”
While local chapters have endorsed Harris and Walz, the powerhouse, nationally-coordinated GOTV campaign that normally goes along with a full union endorsement could have been a major asset in key swing states,” Hoffa said.
“That is a loss for the Harris-Walz ticket.”
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