Trump takes a page from Nixon's labor playbook
Thing is, it's not 1971
Donald Trump has announced that he’s going to skip the second Republican presidential candidates debate next Wednesday, instead holding a simultaneous rally with hundreds of laborers in Michigan, including striking UAW autoworkers. This is almost directly from Richard Nixon’s campaign playbook for 1972, although there are reasons to think it won’t yield Trump the same kind of dividends.
I’m in the middle of teaching about Richard Nixon and organized labor in the early 70s, so this story rather jumped out at me. But one thing that Nixon was extraordinarily adept at was spotting and exploiting divides in the opposing camp. The late 1960s and early 1970s presented such an opportunity for Republicans.
The New Deal Coalition was still quite large at this point, but the 1960s had put a great deal of strain on it. National Democrats’ embrace of Civil Rights had led many southern white Democrats to leave the party, or at least consider doing so. An increasingly vocal and radical anti-war movement, led largely by relatedly well-off college students, was jarring to more moderate, older Democrats. And white working class laborers, who had long been loyal Democratic voters, had a conservative and anti-establishment streak that was aggravated by what they saw as dangerous and privileged hippies and protesters.
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Nixon, who had won the 1968 popular vote by less than one percentage point, was desperate to improve his odds for reelection. He saw white laborers, bothered by the Democratic Party’s leftward turn, as a promising source of votes. The “Hard Hat Riot” of 1970, in which hundreds of New York City construction workers formed a counter-rally to a Vietnam War protest and beat up anti-war demonstrators in the streets, told Nixon that at least some of these folks were open to his appeals, and Nixon leaned in on championing these hardhats as patriots and exemplars of the Silent Majority. Nixon invited some of the hardhat protesters to the White House and received a commemorative pin from them.
The Nixon White House had commissioned several studies to understand the restlessness of the working class, finding basically two things: 1) significant economic anxiety about stagnant wages and benefits, and 2) cultural resentment against people of color and educated protesters. Nixon decided to largely ignore the first concern (although his support for OSHA was quite significant) and lean in hard on the second.
One thing that stood out about that period is that Nixon was also reaching out to labor union leaders; even if he didn’t think much of them, he thought they played an important role in guiding union members’ votes. And he found some common ground with them on culture war issues. AFL-CIO head George Meany had some biting commentary about what he saw at the 1972 Democratic National Convention (the term “woke” was not quite yet being used this way but you can hear it in there anyway):
We listened to the gay lib people—you know the people who want to legalize marriage between boys and boys and girls and girls. We heard from the abortionists, and we heard from the people who look like Jacks, acted like Jills and had the odors of Johns about them.
Rather strikingly, the AFL-CIO did not endorse either party’s candidate in 1972, paving the way for substantial white working class defection to Nixon and one of the largest presidential landslides in American history.
Now, what is Trump trying to do today? In many ways, it’s a similar gambit. He’s trying to identify culturally with workers without addressing their specific economic grievances. As the NY Times notes,
Mr. Trump intends to speak to over 500 workers, with his campaign planning to fill the room with plumbers, pipe-fitters, electricians, as well as autoworkers, according to one of the Trump advisers familiar with the planning. Mr. Trump has not directly addressed the wage demands of striking workers and has attacked the union leadership, but he has tried to more broadly cast himself on the side of autoworkers.
His ads echo these themes:
The Trump campaign has produced a radio ad that will begin running on Tuesday in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, trying to cast Mr. Trump as aligned with autoworkers. The same Trump adviser said the ad targeted union workers and men, and will air on sports and rock-themed stations.
“All they’ve ever wanted is to compete fairly worldwide and get their fair share of the American dream,” the narrator says in the ad. “Donald Trump calls them great Americans and has always had their backs.”
It’s notable that Trump is jumping into the middle of a UAW strike in Detroit. Despite the decline in labor union membership since the 1970s, this summer has seen some impressive demonstrations of union strength. SAG-AFTRA has been on strike for months now, shutting down a good deal of the entertainment industry. Hotel workers have been striking in LA and Orange Counties. UPS workers recently won wage gains after threatening a strike.
But two things stand out about the Detroit rally. One is that it’s in Michigan — a swing state that helped give Trump the presidency in 2016 and take it from him in 2020. Another is that the workers there, compared to many other striking workers across the country, still look relatively like the people Nixon was trying to woo fifty years ago — mostly male and white, and not especially Democratic.
It’s a shrewd move on Trump’s part — both skipping a debate he doesn’t need and rallying a potentially supportive audience in a swing state. But there are three things that make this very different from Nixon’s era: a) there just aren’t as many union construction jobs as there were in the 1970s, b) party coalitions are just far more rigid now than they were then, and c) Trump is running against Joe Biden and not George McGovern. That is, even if Trump’s appeal is successful, it’s not going to yield the same kind of numbers as it did for Nixon.
On the other hand, it doesn’t take that many votes to flip a presidential election anymore.
[I drew extensively from Jefferson Cowie’s excellent Stayin’ Alive for this piece.]