Teamsters Won’t Endorse a Candidate for President in 2024

Teamsters Won’t Endorse a Candidate for President in 2024

The Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, has shown an openness to former President Donald J. Trump, dividing the powerful union. Neither candidate will be the beneficiary of its considerable organizing muscle.

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By Jonathan Weisman

The leadership of the 1.3-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters said in a statement Wednesday it would not back a presidential candidate, a blow to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has the endorsement of the country’s other powerful labor unions.

The decision by the Teamsters board, while short of an endorsement for former President Donald J. Trump, vindicated Mr. Trump’s strategy of wooing the union’s president, Sean O’Brien, a leader who has repeatedly signaled his willingness to chart his own path. The board’s vote was 14 for not endorsing and three for Ms. Harris. No board member backed Mr. Trump.

“Unfortunately neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” Mr. O’Brien said in the statement issued by the board.

Mr. O’Brien’s equivalence between the two candidates could be seen as a boost for Mr. Trump, especially considering the same statement noted that Ms. Harris backed pro-organizing legislation, known as the PRO Act, while Mr. Trump refused to commit to vetoing so-called right-to-work legislation, which would prohibit mandatory union dues payments from workers who opt out of a unionized workplace.

But the former president worked hard to curry Mr. O’Brien’s favor, inviting him to his private club and residence, Mar-a-Lago, this summer and then granting him his wish for a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in July. The Democratic convention rebuffed him.

Mr. O’Brien’s openness to Mr. Trump — who angered other unions by appointing anti-labor members to the National Labor Relations Board and praising Elon Musk recently for a willingness to fire striking workers — has badly divided the union.

The Teamsters’ National Black Caucus, more than a half-dozen Teamsters locals, and members of the union’s national leadership have endorsed Ms. Harris over Mr. O’Brien’s objections. Opponents of the former president have organized a Teamsters Against Trump effort that has undermined Mr. O’Brien two years into his first term as president. After the national union declined to endorse on Wednesday, two Teamsters joint governing councils in the West, which cover 300,000 workers including those in the swing state of Nevada, announced they would back Ms. Harris. A number of other locals followed suit, including union locals in Michigan and Wisconsin.

The union endorsed President Biden in 2020, as well as the Democrats Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

“I’m very disappointed that our international leadership has chosen not to stand up to a bully and an anti-union candidate,” James Curbeam, chairman of the Teamsters’ National Black Caucus, said in an interview Wednesday.

On Monday, Ms. Harris held a round table with Teamsters leaders that was at times tense. Allies of Mr. O’Brien pushed her on the role President Biden played in averting a rail strike in late 2022 and the ways the White House could have been more helpful in a Teamsters dispute last summer with United Parcel Service.

Ms. Harris said she would like the union’s endorsement, but she also said she would win in November and would treat the Teamsters fairly with or without it. Declining to endorse in the presidential election leaves the union officially on the sidelines, depriving both candidates of organizing muscle in the final weeks of the campaign.

The union’s membership was clearly divided. Earlier this year, when Mr. Biden was still in the race, Mr. O’Brien asked each Teamsters local to hold a straw poll. The Teamsters released those results on Wednesday: Mr. Biden had won a plurality, 44 percent to Mr. Trump’s 36 percent. But the union released two other surveys as well, an “electronic member poll” that showed Mr. Trump crushing Ms. Harris, 60 percent to 34 percent, and a “research phone poll” with a similar Trump lead, 58 percent to 31 percent.

The Trump campaign hailed those numbers: “The vast majority of rank-and-file working men and women in this important organization want President Donald Trump back in the White House,” it said in a statement.

But the release of those polls, with their stark shift in opinion, prompted additional disagreement. Mr. Curbeam said the latter numbers were gleaned from an unscientific survey printed on the back of the union’s magazine.

And the Harris campaign took an unexpected swipe at Teamsters leaders after the decision.

“As the vice president told the Teamsters on Monday, when she is elected president, she will look out for the Teamsters rank-and-file no matter what,” Lauren Hitt, a Harris campaign spokeswoman, said, leaving out the top brass.

Ahead of the decision, the Harris campaign tried to mitigate the blow, noting that of the 10 largest unions in the country, only the Teamsters had not backed her, and that the umbrella labor organization, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., represents about 10 times the number of workers in the Teamsters and is working hard on Ms. Harris’s behalf.

Still, with its diffuse membership and its working-class credibility among truck drivers, rail workers and freight haulers, the Teamsters union could have bolstered the Democrats’ ground game in battleground states this fall.

The decision not to endorse reflected the divisions within the union’s rank-and-file. Leaders who backed Ms. Harris noted that the Biden administration had done much to like. Mr. Biden’s Covid relief bill, the American Rescue Plan, included the one measure that Teamsters leaders wanted the most — a huge bailout of pension plans that will restore retirement accounts at the union for three decades.

“When we were all worried about what was going to happen with our pensions, I remember watching Kamala Harris cast that vote, and there was nothing but applause all around,” said Michelle Espinoza, 51, a member of Teamsters Local 135 in Indianapolis who drives a semi-truck cross country with her husband every week. (Ms. Harris broke the tie on the American Rescue Plan.)

The $1 trillion infrastructure bill, the $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act and its $370 billion for clean energy to combat climate change all had pro-union provisions, including measures that mandated union-scale wages and tilted toward union apprenticeship and training programs.

But working-class voters, especially white men, have favored Mr. Trump, a point Ms. Harris conceded on Monday when she told Teamsters leaders that she understood the union’s rank-and-file was looking at issues beyond labor, such as immigration. She implored Teamsters officials to tell members that she had backed a bipartisan border security bill that was negotiated in the Senate and then killed at the behest of Mr. Trump.