The share of U.S. union members who identify as liberal has fallen from a 43% high in 2017 to 36% in the 2023 data. Roughly a third of labor union members (32%) say they are conservative, up from 28% in 2017, while the largest growth on the ideological spectrum has gone to the center, which makes up 28% of the labor coalition compared with 21% six years ago.
The clash between more union members aligning with the Democratic Party while labor’s ranks have strayed from the ideological left generally tracks with our understanding of the broader electorate. Last July, we found that while America has become less liberal since 2017, it has not necessarily become more conservative — a finding that has even persisted among Democrats, albeit to a lesser extent.
What it means
Currently backed by the most voter support they’ve had in years, labor unions from Detroit to Hollywood feel empowered to flex their muscles. Amid this climate, our latest data reveals opportunities for political actors on both sides of the aisle to capitalize, to the potential detriment of big businesses.
On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden’s party still has a built-in advantage when voters are asked which party cares about poor and middle-class Americans, while voters are far more likely to say the Republican Party supports big businesses and the elites. Biden’s high-profile embrace of the union movement — marked by his visit to the United Auto Workers strike, along with a louder touting of his and congressional Democrats’ advancement of domestic policy measures that will fund public-works jobs — could help strengthen his party’s standing with organized labor and improve perceptions of its empathy for working-class Americans.
On the Republican side of the aisle, the issue is trickier.
While former President Donald Trump’s populist rebrand of the Republican Party has undoubtedly improved its standing on those same questions of empathy, his party is still well known for policies meant to cripple organized labor, such as the state-level push for “right-to-work” laws. Voices such as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), a fellow 2024 presidential candidate, have called for the striking auto workers to be fired. And even Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who recently visited picketers at a car plant in Missouri in a show of solidarity, was chastised for his past support for right to work and his opposition to a minimum wage increase.
However, the fact that union ranks have distanced themselves from the ideological left in recent years should give Democrats pause, especially given that voters are notably more likely to see that party as ideologically extreme — not to mention cultural tensions with the working class, and especially the white people among it. These structural advantages may continue to play in the GOP’s favor despite a recent history of countervailing action at the policy level.
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