WASHINGTON — Just over a decade ago, the United Auto Workers union was instrumental in delivering a resounding Michigan victory for former President Barack Obama in his successful 2012 reelection bid.
UAW officials, then-union President Bob King recalled, received personal thanks for their organizing efforts by Obama and two of his key advisers, David Axelrod and David Plouffe. In those days, the union still resembled a political powerhouse.
“We put together a program, and we mandated that international staff, regional staff, anybody that was under our control, had to go into the workplaces on a regular basis and have conversations with members and give them the facts,” King told The Detroit News in an interview last week. “Tell members it’s your decision, but we just want to make sure you have this information.”
But in the years following, and even leading up to that moment, the political power of the UAW was fading. As Donald Trump rose and won appeal among working-class voters across the union-heavy Midwest, the UAW suffered internal strife. The former Republican president, again his party’s nominee in 2024, famously flipped Michigan and UAW-heavy Ohio in 2016 on his way to an upset win over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Now, as the union returns to political relevance under President Shawn Fain, the pressure is heating up for the organization to once again deliver a big-time result in Michigan, this time for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, who is set to visit Detroit on Labor Day. Experts, labor officials and Democratic politicians say the UAW appears to mostly be doing the right things if it wants to beat Trump and prevent the anti-labor policies many fear his second term could bring.
But they also said Fain’s vigor and rising national profile will not be enough itself to turn out votes as the UAW seeks to regain its past influence. It will need to make the case directly to its members, and others with ties to the union, like in 2012. For the UAW, the stakes are high, King said.
“If Trump got elected and he got a trifecta of the House and the Senate, he would attack our rights to bargain, he would attack our rights to fight for good pensions and good health care,” he said.
‘Return to roots’
Fain has had an eventful tenure since narrowly winning the post in the union’s first direct election of international officers in March 2023. Most notably, he led the UAW in last fall’s historic, targeted plant strikes against all three Detroit automakers, which boosted his profile and helped him become a top voice for the Democratic Party and its efforts to defeat Trump. He often appears on the national media circuit and last month became the first UAW president since King to speak at the Democratic National Convention.
That night — as he has commonly done over the past year — Fain bashed the former president. He wore a T-shirt that said, “Trump is a scab.”
“Joe Biden was not the anti-Trump. Kamala Harris is not the anti-Trump. Shawn Fain is the anti-Trump … He so authentically speaks for the working class of this country, and that is such a proud thing for the UAW,” said former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin, D-Michigan, in a phone interview with The Detroit News.
U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, added that she thought his address was “pathbreaking,” noting an “electricity” that gives him potential to become a transformational leader in the labor movement.
The union’s recent return to relevance is, in some ways, also a return to its early years, said Seth Harris, a former U.S. labor secretary under Obama who also served in the Clinton and Biden administrations. He compared the nascent Fain era to the union’s peak in the mid-20th century.
“I view today’s UAW as very similar to the UAW of Walter Reuther that I studied when I was in college,” he said. “It has returned to its activist and confrontational roots.”
Harris credits Fain for bringing the union’s voice back to the national stage on a wide range of issues affecting UAW membership. He noted that Fain’s forceful rhetoric is a stark departure from recent history. The UAW of the Obama and Bill Clinton eras, he said, was involved in public policy, but closely focused on trade issues such as the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“It was not the kind of confrontational stand-up strike, sit down strike approach that had been the brand of the UAW for a long time, and I think is the brand of the UAW again,” Harris said.
But the former labor secretary also made sure to note that the union’s reemergence is not solely because of efforts by its current leadership. The Biden-Harris administration played a leading role in giving the UAW a newfound voice in Washington, even before Fain was elected last year.
picket line before endorsing a reelection bid that he abandoned in July.
Biden — who labels himself the most pro-union president in American history — actively sought input and buy-in from the union in crafting some of his administration’s signature legislation, like 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“Both the administration and the Democrats in Congress were keenly aware that the UAW had to be a partner in the discussion around climate change and climate policy, because it was also going to be a significant part of an industrial policy and a jobs policy,” Harris explained. That dialogue, he added, began under Fain’s predecessor, Ray Curry.
The UAW didn’t make Fain available for an interview last week.
Rebuilding the Reuther machine
Levin recalled the UAW of his childhood. His family has been intertwined with union organizing and Democratic Party politics in Michigan since the mid-20th century, and he recalled Democratic field operations that “were so powerfully driven” by the UAW.
“I’m talking enthusiasm. I’m talking levels of organization. It was really something to behold,” he said.
Levin added that you could walk into a regional union office in the morning and find thousands of people there, prepping to go talk to voters and hand out literature. That level of UAW-led grassroots mobilizing isn’t there anymore, he acknowledged.
“I don’t think you can instantly rebuild that to the level it once was,” Levin said.
With just over two months until Election Day, he added, the UAW is trying to use its momentum from the strikes and organizing drives over the past year to do some of that political organizing on the fly.
On Aug. 14, the union launched a grassroots effort to support Vice President Harris’ White House bid. There was no similar drive in place to support Biden’s reelection effort before he dropped out in late July. The UAW didn’t respond to a request for more information about its voter outreach efforts ahead of the election.
The union is also behind its usual pace of political giving, according to data from OpenSecrets.
The UAW spent a total of about $8.8 million to support Democrats in 2020 elections. The data for 2024 show that UAW has spent far less so far this year, as of its most recent FEC filing in July, though it did give $1.5 million to the Democratic National Committee — by far its largest pledge to the DNC since the FEC started collecting the data in 1974, according to a Detroit News analysis.
Tony Totty, the president of UAW Local 14, which represents workers at the General Motors Co. Toledo Propulsion Systems plant, said that the union does have political organizing momentum — including in its communications efforts — that can be traced back to last fall’s strikes of the Detroit Three.
“We’re doing a better job communicating to everybody what’s at stake, what we deserve, what we can get, and what we need to fight for,” said Totty, who was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “And (the union) did it through the strategy with the companies (last fall) — whipsawing them, communicating to the workers, and communicating to the public. And, you know, our politicians aren’t dumb. They’re watching everything, and they want to hurry up and run to be on our side.”
He noted the UAW’s growing political influence is for more than just helping elect Harris. In Ohio, the union is backing Rep. Kaptur and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, for instance, two Democrats in tough reelection fights. Its political sway is also helping the union more effectively push automakers to make certain changes like investing to create new jobs in communities where plants have closed, such as in Lordstown, Ohio, and Belvidere, Ill., Totty said, so that workers can return home.
Ultimately, he said he also hopes the union can help elect enough Democrats in Congress to pass pro-union legislation such as the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and tougher trade policies so that the U.S. isn’t “flooded full of Chinese EVs that you’re seeing in Europe now.”
EVs and Trump
Political observers said the union must ensure it’s doing the necessary face-to-face worker organizing — which King said was so instrumental in 2012 — if it hopes to deliver a Harris victory.
Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan said he expects a lot of rank-and-file union members to vote for Trump. He pointed to inflation and policies from the Biden-Harris administration to promote EVs — an issue union leaders like Fain have also voiced concern over — as key reasons.
“They got a contract pay increase, very significant. They like that,” Walberg said of UAW workers. “But they also aren’t dumb enough to think that Shawn Fawn getting in bed with a Green New Deal and EVs is going to protect their jobs, so they’re taking the money while they can get it. But they know that if their union continues to support electrification of the auto industry that their job is going to go away.”
U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Michigan, a longtime union ally, emphasized that things like DNC speeches, State of the Union appearances and featured spots at campaign rallies do not necessarily translate to votes.
“We cannot take for granted the union halls. Nobody can take for granted the union halls,” she said. “Shawn Fain knows that there’s work to be done in both the union halls and with the retirees.”
The aggressive political mobilizing the union has done through the years is the result of past teachings that winning has to go beyond the bargaining table.
“Walter Reuther, who Shawn reminds me of,” King said, “said that ‘whatever you win at the bargaining, you can lose it at the ballot box.’”
