Sweeney: Off-Year Election Results Show Unionists Energized for 2008
Friday, November 9, 2007
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
WASHINGTON
(PAI)--Off-year election results in state and municipal races on Nov. 6 show
union voters are already energized for 2008, AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney
says. And they also show unionists and the country want “a clear
rejection of Bush administration policies,” adds federation Political Director
Karen Ackerman.
Ackerman, Sweeney and others spoke in a
telephone press conference after election returns came in from New Jersey local
races, the Virginia legislature, gubernatorial contests in Kentucky and
Mississippi, mayoral races in several large cities and ballot initiatives in
many states.
The most notable results were in “red” states.
In Kentucky, former Lieut. Gov. Steve Beshear (D), making his first statewide
race in 20 years, handily ousted scandal-scarred GOP Gov. Ernie Fletcher.
Beshear’s margin was around 20%.
In Utah, one of the “reddest”
states for anti-worker GOP President George W. Bush in 2004, the Utah Education
Association and its allies waged a successful campaign to defeat a plan to give
taxpayer-paid vouchers to attend private schools to the parents of every child
in the state, destroying public education.
Vouchers, passed
early in the year by the GOP-run state legislature--but only by one vote in the
state house--lost by a 62%-38% margin and lost every Utah county.
In
Virginia, where unionists are only 4% of the workforce, their get-out-the-vote
efforts, phone banks and precinct walking helped overcome GOP campaigning
against immigrants. Virginians ousted 5 GOP state senators, changing party
control there to the Democrats for the first time since 1991, and cut the GOP
margin in the state assembly. In New Jersey, 33 more unionists joined 400
already elected to local offices.
Sweeney, Ackerman and Karen White,
campaigns and elections director of the independent National Education
Association--the nation’s largest union--particularly cited the Kentucky and
Utah results as evidence of the energy among unionists. Ackerman and
Sweeney predicted it would carry over into 2008.
“There were 350,000
union voters out of a total of 1.05 million in Kentucky,” Ackerman said,
including unionists, members of their households, retirees and 50,000 Kentucky
members of Working America, the AFL-CIO’s affiliate for people who do not have
union locals. “And 77% voted for Beshear. That’s an
astounding number.”
And there in and in Virginia “we’re gearing
up for Senate races” and the presidential race next year, she added.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kent.), who has $9 million in the bank
and who has won past elections easily, faces Bluegrass State voters next
year. Virginia’s GOP-held U.S. Senate seat is open.
“Working
people are driving a major change in the political landscape. We’re on
the cusp of a shift that could redefine American politics for decades to
come,” Sweeney predicted. Voters, he added, “sent a powerful message
that if you attack working people, you do so at your peril.”
Though Sweeney did not say so, McConnell led the GOP filibuster that
killed the Employee Free Choice Act, which would help level the playing field
between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining, earlier this
year.
In the Utah vote, 60 well-heeled Right Wingers pumped $3.8
million into their pro-vouchers campaign, and their ad blitz tied opposition to
vouchers to “liberals” and unions. It didn’t work due to what
NEA’s White called “our new ground game.” Unions and their allies,
including student groups and school boards, spent just over $3 million.
White explained the Utah campaign featured microtargeting of
pro-education voters, especially in rural areas, along with close coordination
with the AFL-CIO. That microtargeting, identified--and sent tailored
mailings to--persuadable voters or to pro-worker voters who, however, were
unlikely to go to the polls in years past.
Microtargeting will
be particularly useful, White added, next year because NEA, unlike the other big
teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, has a high proportion of
rural members and chapters in every state. That could help turn out
pockets of pro-education voters where, before, none existed. She
said NEA would continue and expand both microtargeting and cooperation with the
AFL-CIO in 2008.
“We paid special attention to rural
areas. We pointed out there weren’t even private schools available for
some of these parents to send their kids to. Some would have had to drive
hundreds of miles--and we showed them that on our website,” White said. The
results were led by vouchers’ 4-to-1 loss in a rural southwest Utah
county.