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While Other Voters Moved Away From the Democrats, Union Members Shifted Toward Harris in 2024

Many election analysts observe that Vice President Kamala Harris underperformed in 2024 compared with President Joe Biden in 2020 among key demographic groups, especially the working class. However, the Harris-Walz campaign managed to outperform Biden-Harris among union members. Joe Biden won union members handily in 2020, reversing a decline in union support for Democratic candidates that began in 2016, according to previous Center for American Progress Action Fund research. And, according to the VoteCast survey conducted for The Associated Press (AP) and Fox News, Harris appeared to widen Biden’s margin, with union voters preferring Harris over Donald Trump by 16 percentage points in 2024.
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According to the 2024 VoteCast survey conducted for AP and Fox News—one of the most accurate voting polls currently available—57 percent of union members voted for Harris compared with 41 percent for Trump, a 16-point margin and an improvement over the 14-point margin Biden achieved among union members, according to 2020 VoteCast data. (see Figure 1) Additionally, the AP-Fox News survey estimates that, while only 9 percent of people who voted were union members in 2020, this increased to 11 percent in 2024, which may suggest union members turned out in greater numbers in 2024. These results are largely consistent with exit polls from the consortium, including NBC and CNN, showing that Harris still won union households in 2024, though by narrower margins compared with union voters alone. (The NBC-CNN exit poll reported data for voters from households with a union member, meaning its results for union households include many voters who are not themselves union members; AP-Fox News results for union households similarly show a narrower margin than for union members.)
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Recent Democratic Party success with union members can be put in greater context using data from the Cooperative Election Study, a large academic survey, in addition to the AP-Fox News survey. As shown in Figure 2, in 2020, the margin for Democratic candidates among union members compared with nonunion members began to increase, reaching a 10-percentage-point higher vote share in 2024 . The margin was even higher in 2022, reaching a 12.3-percentage-point higher vote share among union members compared with nonunion members, as off-year elections tend to have lower turnout, meaning voter information and turnout campaigns could have greater impact. This margin was far smaller in the election of Trump in 2016—just 4.4 percentage points—and it stayed small in 2018. However, the trend reversed as the Biden-Harris campaign ran on a pro-worker platform, and, in fact, the support the Biden-Harris campaign received among union voters was one of the factors that secured his win in 2020, especially in some swing states.

https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/while-other-voters-moved-away-from-the-democrats-union-members-shifted-toward-harris-in-2024/