UAW tests a smaller, split Michigan base in midterm push

The United Auto Workers is still the largest union in Michigan, but the base it is mobilizing for the Nov. 3 midterms is far smaller than the one it once commanded: about 350,000 active and retired members in the state today, against more than 600,000 in the 1980s, according to union figures cited in Associated Press reporting on the UAW's election push. Many of the members its canvassers now reach are retirees, and they do not vote as a bloc.

Macomb County, north of Detroit, shows the problem. Donald Trump carried it by nearly 14 percentage points in 2024, and it is where UAW volunteers spent a Saturday in late September knocking on doors in Shelby Township. Walter Usakowski, who worked at Ford's Sterling Axle Plant for more than 45 years, told them he was already backing the union's Democratic slate. He was less sure about the other "guys in the shop," many of whom he knows supported Trump. A street over, a couple said they both backed Trump and declined to take a flyer listing the union's endorsed candidates.

The divide runs well beyond one subdivision. In 2024, voters who were union members or lived in a union household gave more than half their votes to Kamala Harris and 44% to Trump. Most of the retirees the canvassers met named the cost of living as their top concern; they disagreed on which party would do more about it. Betty Anderson, a UAW member who thinks the union is on the right track, said she is angry with members who voted for Trump. "I don't think those people are ever going to be on our side," she said.

Trust inside the union is its own constraint. Since 2017, more than 10 UAW officials have pleaded guilty in a corruption investigation that found millions of dollars in dues were stolen, and members also blamed past leaders for closed-door contract talks. Shawn Fain won the presidency in 2023 on a transparency platform, and his strike victories against Detroit's three major automakers strengthened his standing with members. He has now said he won reelection to another four-year term, though the results have not been certified.

Fain's political bets have not been the safe ones. In the U.S. Senate primary the union endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Democrat, over Rep. Haley Stevens, a four-term congresswoman who had served as chief of staff on an auto bailout task force during the Great Recession and cited that work often on the trail. "I don't think anybody expected us to endorse him," said Mark DePaoli, director of one of the UAW's southeast Michigan regions, who said the union held candidate forums open to any member.

The union's announcement pointed to El-Sayed's support for universal healthcare and his criticism of corporate money in politics. His campaign said the UAW's backing was critical in a primary in which he was outspent by tens of millions of dollars.

His Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, is running on his opposition to Biden-era federal rules that would have required automakers to ramp up electric vehicle production, rules some feared would close factories. His campaign has made the union's leadership a target in its own right. "The same can't be said for Abdul and UAW national leadership," spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet said in a statement.

The union is also spending political capital on the ballot. In a Sept. 18 statement describing a reboot of its "member-led political program," the UAW urged members and union households to vote No on Proposal 1, which it said would expose the state constitution to billionaire and corporate influence, and Yes on Proposal 2, which it said would ban monopoly utilities such as DTE Energy and other corporations from flooding money into Michigan politics. Fain said the measure "would at least stop a monopoly utility company like DTE from owning elected officials in Lansing."

In September the UAW held a conference of its Michigan political arm in Lansing for the first time since 2018, where Fain said members should drive the union's direction on issues such as affordability. The union said about 113,000 of its members voted early in Michigan's August primary, and it has volunteers canvassing and phoning voters through Election Day.

That field work is the test, according to Robert Bruno, a labor professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "You don't win campaigns off of your endorsements," he said. "You win campaigns at the door, or at the bar, or at the union hall."

JJ Jewell, who sits on the executive committee of the UAW's Community Action Program, set expectations lower than any result in November. "Even if this election goes fantastically, that's not mission accomplished," Jewell said. "That means we're 1% of the way done."