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.
While this improvement in performance among union members was not enough to win Harris the election, these results suggest that Democratic candidates can increase support among union members by appealing to their economic interests through pro-worker policies and appeal to the nonunion working class more broadly by both focusing on economic issues and educating voters about their policies, even as Republicans make it harder for workers to organize.
Unions keep their members informed about economic policy—including during campaign seasons and legislative sessions—and, in this campaign, many of the largest unions engaged in outreach efforts to educate voters and their members. With additional information from a trusted messenger, union voters preferred Harris, the candidate from the most pro-union administration in decades. Both the Biden-Harris and Harris-Walz campaigns made promises to strengthen organizing rights and create good, union jobs in the United States—promises that the Biden-Harris administration worked to fulfill with a once-in-a-generation industrial policy investment program and policies that strengthened the right to organize. In contrast, the far right’s Project 2025 agenda represents a threat to workers with recommendations to fire key labor law enforcers and undo policies that make it easier to form a union, and the results also suggest that union members were not persuaded by overtures from President-elect Donald Trump due to his administration’s antiworker first-term record.
Additional data and analysis will be required for a more complete understanding of the 2024 election, but initial evidence indicates that the Harris campaign’s appeals for union votes were successful. However, unions currently represent just 10 percent of the workforce, and thus their strong support was not enough to overcome losses elsewhere.
Union voters favored Harris in 2024
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.)
Union members were one of the few demographic groups who not only favored Harris overall but did so by a wider margin than they supported Biden in 2020. By contrast, many other critical groups decreased their support for Harris over Trump compared with their support in 2020 for Biden, including, notably, the working class: Trump won the working class, defined as voters without a four-year college degree, of all races by 12 points in 2024, up from just 4 points in 2020.
The results from exit polls and voter surveys conducted on Election Day suggest that union voters may have responded more positively to the pro-worker Biden-Harris administration and Harris-Walz campaigns than working-class voters overall. Both as a candidate and as vice president, Harris made frequent appearances at union halls and alongside labor leaders, voicing support for workers and unions. Similarly, in 2020, President Biden campaigned on a promise to be the “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen.” His 2020 election marked a reversal of the decline in union support for Democrats that began in 2016. Unions have long played a role in educating their members about these economic policies, increasing turnout and informing voter preferences for pro-worker candidates. In this campaign, many of the nation’s largest unions ran education campaigns that ultimately resulted in larger support for Democratic candidates: Among United Auto Workers members in swing states, for example, internal polls found members preferred Harris over Trump by a 22-point margin.
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.
Conclusion
The fact that Harris outperformed Biden among union members is an indication that unions are still a route for building support for Democratic candidates among working-class voters. Unions educate their members about policy, and in this election—with several unions engaged in education campaigns—this fact may have helped inform workers prioritizing economic issues about the pro-worker successes of the Biden-Harris administration.