Surprise! Union backing Biden and Kamala now endorses top Republican

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris now have something in common with Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley: the endorsement from the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers union.

The legislative director of the transportation division of the SMART union, Greg Hynes, informed Hawley of the support in a Sept. 13 letter, citing the Missouri Republican’s “dedication to enhancing rail safety and protecting railroad employees,” RealClearPolitics is first to report.

The endorsement comes as Hawley faces a challenge from Democratic attorney Lucas Kunce in a reelection race that already heavily favors the incumbent. Most election analysts rank Missouri as solidly red, and the incumbent leads there by a healthy 11-point margin in the RealClearPolitics Average.

But the support from labor remains significant beyond just November.

It is the latest dividend from the ongoing conservative courtship of labor, a voting bloc that traditionally favors the left, not the right. For his part, Hawley has placed himself right in the middle of that realignment. The senator wrote a book about Teddy Roosevelt before politics, then spent his time in the Senate running rough-shod over long-held libertarian orthodoxies.

He supports a $15 minimum wage for large corporations and was later one of the few Republicans who supported legislation capping the cost of insulin at $35. He lobbied the administration to block the sale of U.S. Steel to Japanese-owned Nippon Steel Corporation. He wants to reverse Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to corporate money in politics.

Along with other New Right converts, Hawley joined Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance in support of a railway safety bill after a train derailment in East Palestine, which would require freight trains to operate with at least two-person crews. This was of particular concern to the SMART union, whose leadership praised the senator in their letter endorsing him for his “genuine concern for the well-being of railroad employees and the communities we serve.”

This is something of a theme for Hawley. At the National Conservatism Conference earlier this year, the senator blasted members of his own party who, he said, had “cheer-led for corporate tax cuts and low barriers for corporate trade then watched those same corporations ship American jobs overseas.” When it comes to the choice between “labor and capital,” he said the GOP ought to “start prioritizing the working man.”

While critics on the left have dismissed Hawley as “a faux populist,” his heterodoxy has earned him the enduring ire of many on the business-friendly right, including the libertarian-minded Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Economic nationalism is all the rage among Republicans as that party learns to love the tariff and hate the global corporation. During the tenure of former President Trump, the GOP increasingly shifted its focus to rusting factories and depleted industries. Ahead of the last presidential election, conservatives entertained dreams of becoming the party of the working man. They saw mixed results.

Trump, the wealthiest man to occupy the Oval Office, lost the union vote to Biden, a longtime labor champion, by a margin of 56% to 40%.

Biden often brags about being the most pro-union president ever, a boast backed up by an economic agenda that consistently places labor at the center, and his administration embraced its own kind of economic nationalism while attempting to revive domestic manufacturing. This was enough to earn the president the endorsement from the SMART union before he dropped out of the race. The union subsequently endorsed Harris this summer as she promises to continue the work that Biden began.

Labor is not a monolith, however, and unions have put out the word that they are willing to entertain competition. Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union, made that much clear when he gave a keynote address at the Republican National Convention this summer, lambasting the “war against labor” by big business. His union has yet to endorse a candidate in the presidential election in 2024.

Hawley, meanwhile, provides an example of how a Republican can win over the unions. He told RCP that the endorsement from the workers of SMART-TD was “a huge honor,” before vowing “to stand by these workers every step of the way.”

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