LAUSR

The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency was an event that took the nation by surprise. While Trump’s winning total of 306 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 232 appears to indicate that the election was not that close, this margin of 74 electoral votes boiled down to Trump winning three states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that contained a total of 46 electoral votes—by a combined margin of less than 101,000 votes. If Clinton had won all three of these “Rust Belt” states, she would now be the president. Moreover, Clinton won the popular vote by some 2.9 million ballots. Although the U.S. trade union movement has historically backed the Democratic Party since the reelection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) in 1936, the 2016 presidential election was the first time that many union members failed to heed their leaders’ pick for the U.S. presidency. While labor organizations such as the Communication Workers of America, the American Postal Workers Union, and National Nurses United (NNU) supported the social democratic Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primaries and caucuses, after Clinton received the Democratic Party’s nomination, virtually all the unions endorsed Clinton except for the NNU. Trump received only a handful of endorsements from labor organizations—the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Border Patrol Council, and the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council—because of his law enforcement and draconian anti-immigration policies. In spite of the U.S. trade unions ponying up a record $100 million to help Clinton while investing countless hours telephoning union members to vote for her, such efforts were unsuccessful in delivering labor’s vote. Edison Research and CNN exit polls revealed that U.S. union households narrowly backed Clinton (51% to 43%) although she won Michigan (53% to 40%) and Wisconsin (53% to 43%) union households by slightly larger margins. Clinton, however, lost union households to Trump in Ohio (42% to 54%). Because Obama obtained almost 60 percent of the 2008 and 2012