Social issues drove some Teamsters to ‘take that risk’ and vote for anti-union candidate Trump

On a Sunday morning in a Northeast Philadelphia American Legion hall, Bill Hamilton opened his monthly union membership meeting with an allusion to the biggest business of the day: President-elect Donald Trump had won the election in the weeks since their last meeting.

The Pledge of Allegiance was recited. A moment of silence was held for fallen union members, their loved ones, and troops overseas. And then Hamilton spoke.

“Donald Trump is the president,” said Hamilton, vice president of the Teamsters Eastern Region and business agent at Teamsters Local 107 in the Northeast. “We have to accept that and move on.”

Hamilton, a Democrat, had seen divisive social media posts and negative political rhetoric rampage through his normally tight-knit local. He made it his mission to educate his guys on the threat a Trump presidency posed to unions like theirs, even after the International Brotherhood of Teamsters chose not to endorse a candidate for president, the first time since 1996 that the union opted against endorsing the Democrat in the race. But Hamilton wasn’t surprised when the international organization released data from its unscientific online poll showing 66% of Local 107 members — mostly men who drive trucks and work construction — favored Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

“Our own union was split over this stuff,” Hamilton told his members last Sunday. “We had brothers and sisters not talking to each other over this stuff.”

Organized labor has long been a stable voting bloc for Democrats, and Biden curried favor with the Teamsters specifically when he helped protect many of their pensions through a provision in his American Rescue Plan. But even as Harris won nearly all labor endorsements, she lost in the end in part because of a rightward shift among working-class voters, the shift seen inside Local 107. Bob Brown, 67, a retired Teamster and dedicated Democrat who voted for Harris, said union members usually vote for the candidates their leadership recommends, who historically have been Democrats.

“We all came from an era where there was times when you weren’t split,” said Brown. “This was probably the first time that we ever seen something like this.”

Edmund Farley, a Local 107 member, voted for the first time in his life this year when he cast a ballot for Trump. Farley, 50, said he was looking for change in the country’s direction and said it was “definitely social issues” that motivated his vote.

“I didn’t like the whole thing about men being able to play in women’s sports,” said Farley, a father of two daughters, about the idea of transgender women and girls competing in athletic programs for women. He also took issue with transgender women using women’s bathrooms alongside his daughters, he said.

Trump and his surrogates made attacks against transgender people central to their campaign, spending millions of dollars on anti-LGBTQ ads that demonized Harris for her support for transgender people. Several people mentioned one prominent anti-Harris commercial about gender-affirming care — called “sex changes” in the ad — for undocumented people in prisons.

Hamilton saw the ads while watching football on Sundays.

“The ads that they were running [were] attacking Harris very boldly about her comments on transgender operations in prison and stuff like that,” Hamilton said. “Stuff that middle-class, white Americans particularly get disturbed with. And [Democrats] weren’t answering back on that.”

Heath Fogg Davis, a political science professor and program director at Temple University, said he wasn’t surprised by what feels like a regression of public perception about transgender issues.

“Historically with civil rights gains and losses there’s been a kind of ebb and flow, a pattern of kind of reform and then retrenchment,” Davis said. “Trans civil rights are kind of like the newest civil rights-protected category.”

Michael Sviben, a retired union truck driver from Camden, said he voted for former President Barack Obama in 2012. This year, he cast a ballot for Trump because he felt he couldn’t trust President Joe Biden or Harris.

Sviben, 70, said he didn’t have any top issues but wanted to “see if we can get this country back together.”

“I hear Trump, as soon as he gets in the office, he’s gonna be able to stop the wars, close the border,” Sviben said, before calling Harris the border czar and saying the border has been open under her watch.

Conservative media and officials have attacked Harris, who was assigned the longer-term task of tackling the root issues of immigration, over border-control issues.

The Teamsters’ shift toward Trump comes as many feel the president-elect poses a threat to workers’ rights.

Trump has avoided supporting increases to the federal minimum wage. He altered an impending Obama-era overtime rule by decreasing the income threshold for overtime workers, which made an estimated 3 million fewer workers eligible for overtime pay, and has championed blanket tariffs, which economists expect will raise the cost of goods imported to the U.S. from other countries.

In August, the United Auto Workers filed labor charges against Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk for comments Trump made about firing striking workers.

“I was willing to take that risk and vote for that,” said Farley.

The Teamsters have always been more conservative than other labor unions, said Paul Clark, a professor of labor at Pennsylvania State University. Members have, though, usually supported candidates they think are going to be most friendly to labor, but that has changed.

“Union members, at least in recent elections, have been prioritizing social issues — transgender and gay rights issues that they’ve been uncomfortable with, gun control, abortion, immigrants moving into their community,” Clark said.

Randie McDonough, 60, is a truck driver and a political junkie who rattled off percentages of inflation and unemployment statistics with rapid-fire precision. Ahead of the election, he polled his colleagues about why they were voting for Trump.

“And a lot of the guys,” said McDonough, who voted for Harris, “Spanish, my Black friends, everybody basically, [said they] don’t want a woman in charge.”

Postelection, Teamsters who voted for Harris are grappling with their colleagues who didn’t.

“I don’t understand my union brothers and sisters that supported Trump or the workers in general,” said Bob Strunk, 74, a retired truck driver. “Everybody thinks that they’re worse off because of people on welfare and immigrants, they think they’re taking their crumbs. But they’re worse off because the ultra-wealthy only allows them to have crumbs.

“We’re not going to always agree on things like guns, gays, race, religion,” Strunk said. “But we got to unite around the things we do agree on, and that’s our working conditions.”

It’s about more than that for Trump voter Farley.

“You can’t just vote because [it’s] going to benefit me in the union,” he said. “I did it mainly hoping for my children for the future. … It’s not about me, it’s about our country.”