How the Democrats can win the Rust Belt The Pennsylvania vote will be determined in the gun clubs

But how did unions cultivate such loyalty among members, and what can Democrats learn from it? The answer, I suspect, lies in understanding that how we vote is based on a lot more than a candidate’s stance on a particular issue. More often than not, the powerful nature of community attachments comes into play.

Perhaps predictably, then, the presidential tickets are fighting desperately to court the votes of union families in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. But while union presidents were primetime speakers at both conventions, the parties’ strategies have differed markedly. On one side, the Harris-Walz ticket is playing up its commitment to unions and the right to organise, distributing “Union Yes!” signs to audience members at the Democratic National Convention. The Trump-Vance ticket, in contrast, is stressing the failed free-trade policies of previous administrations and proposing protectionist policies toward domestic industry, such as a 60% tariff on goods imported from China.

Who will prove the more convincing? Union voters have a high likelihood of showing up to the polls, but it’s unclear who they’ll favour and by how much. Aggregate exit polling data shows that Joe Biden ran away with the union vote in 2020, with 56% to Donald Trump’s 40%. But aggregate exit polling data is misleading. Most union members today live in solidly Democratic states. Those are not the union voters who could decide the 2024 presidential election. Rather, the union population being sought by Harris and Trump are workers, retirees, and families in industrial or building trade unions in those key Rust Belt states.

It’s hard to overstate how much of a departure from mid-20th-century union loyalty it is that Trump has a very good chance of winning the vote among these union members. Although it may seem unimaginable today, these voters — prototypically white men without college degrees who worked in the trades or heavy industry in the Midwest — used to be a reliably Democratic constituency. As one union retiree told me, most blue-collar workers in the mid-20th century “figured there wasn’t a Republican in the world who took care of the working guy”.

But things have changed. In the employee parking lots of unionised western Pennsylvania steel mills, the most frequent type of bumper sticker relates to guns. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump stickers abound as well. The licence plates of the cars in the employee parking lots are not only from Pennsylvania but also from West Virginia and Ohio. In contrast to the mid-20th century, when workers lived around the mill in the same several communities, these workers came from all over the region.

At the executive level, union loyalty to the Democratic Party is largely intact, despite leadership being aware of the chasm between them and the workers. At election season, union leadership sends members pamphlets and candidate information, and many unions make endorsements. But union members have never liked being told by the leadership how to vote. Polling data from 1955 show that, even back then, the majority of United Steelworkers (USW) members didn’t think their union should even be making endorsements. And yet the vast majority of those members voted in line with the union’s endorsements for Democrats.

In the days of the solidly blue union vote, workers viewed being a member as a core piece of their identity. Just as people display allegiances to sports teams by wearing jerseys and caps, they often had rings or pins. One retiree I spoke with, for example, proudly wears a ring with the engraving “USW Retiree” and the union’s logo. And if you go digging through the bins of small metal items at antique stores in the Rust Belt, you’re likely to find some United Mineworker rings or United Autoworker pins.

Unions in the mid-20th century were deeply embedded into family and community life. Brick-and-mortar union halls were used for more than just union meetings: they hosted banquets and dances, Christmas parties and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Beyond the physical halls, local unions hosted sports leagues for members, provided community services, and circulated information via newsletters to members and their families about local and national happenings. Unions were woven into the community fabric and being a “union family” had a great deal of personal importance.

Back then, local unions were much more than collective bargaining units or political action groups, and that’s why they had so much power. We don’t vote based on purely economic metrics or a dispassionate calculus of policy pros and cons. If that were the case, most college-educated people would be irrational actors — they’re less likely to use government-provided social services and more likely to pay higher tax rates. We vote based on who we are. Being a union man or union family — or even living in a union town — meant being part of a shared identity, and that shared identity was inextricably connected to voting Democrat.

When people receive political cues, we make both conscious and subconscious decisions about what to filter out and what to hold onto. Our subconscious decisions about what to hold onto are informed, in part, by our social identities. For example, a union steelworker voting for Trump may cite the fact that Trump signed an executive order to protect the domestic steel industry by putting tariffs on steel imports. It is simultaneously true, however, that as president, Trump made it easier to fire striking workers and harder to organise. What made that worker overlook the anti-union actions that Trump took as president? Perhaps because that worker does not have a strong stake in his union. I would venture to guess that if that worker’s friends were all fellow union members, and if they had a union hall that they frequented every so often for parties and gatherings, and the union sponsored his son’s Little League team, the answer might be different.

Because multiple messages can be true, it’s a matter of which messages are being listened to. What we spend our time on, the places we spend our time in, and the people we spend time with are how we subconsciously prioritise information we receive. Unions used to be, and to a lesser degree still are, central places where people would get messages from trusted sources — not necessarily from union executives in Washington, D.C., but from fellow workers and their families. The bumper stickers in the union parking lots indicate that, today, this process of prioritisation no longer favours unions.

Gun clubs, like the one that Herman frequents, aren’t new in western Pennsylvania. But their function as community gathering spaces has increased in importance as other institutional spaces have shrivelled. Just as union halls used to be built in part to be social spaces, so too are gun clubs. Today, they are some of the most vibrant civic associations in smaller towns and cities in western Pennsylvania and other electorally important regions of the Midwest.

Consolidated churches and megachurches are other civic associations that are thriving in these areas. One union retiree told me that her grandson is deeply involved in his megachurch. “It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure,” she said. “They have groups for everything. You like rock music? There’s a group for that. Punk music? A group for that.” The backdrop of this community atmosphere, she said, is an intense form of traditionalism and conservatism — “anti-abortion and stuff like that, for sure”.

Unions used to balance out some of the conservative forces at play in predominantly white, Christian regions of the industrial Midwest. A former mine inspector even told me a story about how a United Mineworker (UMWA) member joked to him that he didn’t join the Ku Klux Klan because he was a UMWA member — “and we believe in equality and all that”, he had said. Now, the union counterweight in many of these communities is largely gone.

But while union halls may no longer exist in all of these places, people are still getting together somewhere. And the Democrats, if they’re smart, should try to locate those places. Every community is different. Maybe it’s a café or a bookstore that hosts workshops and events. Maybe it’s a Boys and Girls Club or a Lions Club. It might be a knitting club. Once those places are identified, a smart Democrat strategist could scope out friendly players. Someone in a leadership position at the Boys and Girls Club, for instance, may be open to the Democrats using the space to coordinate door-knocking events. The knitting club might in fact be an excuse for women who were part of the anti-Trump “Resistance” movement in 2016 to get together to chat about local happenings and politics. Using the existing, informal community infrastructure can help get more people involved. And it’s more likely to be effective for people who wouldn’t otherwise get involved but will, because their friends are. That’s how mobilisation often happens — through friends.

When it is not election time, the model of the Democratic Party on the state and county level should be long-term investment in building community in towns and localities. Having brick-and-mortar locations, hosting events, organising community service initiatives or block parties, and having volunteers show up at every local parade, fair, or festival (and, at least in western Pennsylvania, there’s a lot). This is a long term project. Its goal would not be to politicise everything. Indeed, similar to union community life, organising efforts would not have to always put the Democratic Party in the foreground. When a union hall hosted rare-coin trading events, for example, it didn’t have people going around the room telling attendees about the benefits of joining a union. It was enough that the event was there, in that space, to convey that the union was present and committed to the community. Building a hub for community information and happenings would begin to build two-way relationships between community members and the Democrats. On Election Day, there will be a huge effort to drive community members to the polls. Maybe, year-round, the county Democratic Party could coordinate a volunteer system to deliver food to elderly community members.

There’s been a lot of talk about civic decline and the loneliness epidemic in America. In the industrial Midwest, there is no speedy remedy for the sense of loss that many people have experienced as a result of regional economic decline and the toll that addiction has had on many communities. But it starts somewhere. Unions didn’t have banquet halls for collective bargaining purposes, and, likewise, gun clubs don’t have clubhouses so members can become better shooters. To rebuild support — and for the more important goal of creating stronger communities — the Democratic Party should take note.

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Lainey Newman wrote Rust Belt Union Blues (Columbia University Press, 2023) with political scientist and Harvard professor Theda Skocpol. She is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is currently a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. 

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