AFL-CIO's Trumka Tells Newsmax How Biden Will Carry Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told Newsmax Thursday morning he feels Joe Biden is now leading Donald Trump in three union-strong states the President carried in 2016.

In predicting that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will give their electoral votes to Biden in the fall, Trumka acknowledged that the votes of many of his membership in 2016 helped swing all three states to Donald Trump and thus made him president.

“He got 3 percentage more [of the labor vote] than [Mitt] Romney did [in ‘16],” the labor chieftain said, “It was clustered in a lot of important areas and that’s what makes that 3 percent significant.”

“They were looking for someone to change things to make the system work for them,” said Trumka, who spoke at a virtual press breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. 

But after four years, he quickly added, “they know what is happening.  [Trump] is the most anti-union president we’ve seen in decades.  We have fewer manufacturing jobs…almost 275,000…Fewer mining jobs.”

Offering a taste of what Trump can expect from the AFL-CIO, Trumka told reporters that “we know that all the promises he made on infrastructure never came about.  In fact, he presented a budget that actually negative spending on infrastructure, not positive.”

“When those facts get to our members, they understand that he wasn’t what he said he was.  He hasn’t lived up to his hype.  His rhetoric doesn’t match what he was.”   

Trumka spelled out just how organized labor has been mobilizing to defeat Trump.

“We’re doing town hall meetings, we’re doing more contact with the locals, we’re still doing phonebankings and things of that sort,” he explained, “We won’t do as much door-knocking, because of COVID.  So we’ll do a number of social media, we’ll be texting, we’re encouraging people to vote early and vote by mail.”

Those that vote early, Trumka said, “we’ll try to track them and try to convert them into being volunteer workers on Election Day.  So we can keep as many voting sites open as possible.”

The AFL-CIO president believes the staffing of polling places is critical “because it’s obvious what Donald Trump’s strategy is.  It’s to tamp down the voting.  It’s to prevent you from voting by mail by putting things in your mind that voting by mail isn’t safe, it’s fraudulent.  It just won’t work [because] they won’t get there, you just can’t trust it.” 

“We have 500,000 members in the Postal Service and we trust them to do their job every single day.  The Postal Service has the ability to do 4.7 million pieces of mail a day.  And during the rush season like Christmas, they can go to 6 million a day.”