Ever since the 1980 presidential campaign, Michigan — particularly Southeast Michigan — has been identified as for-Reagan Democratic.
As he campaigned for president in 1980, Reagan reached out to blue-collar voters over the heads of union leaders. Union leaders were completely frustrated by Reagan’s success.
Reagan succeeded in neutralizing organized labor’s traditional appeal on behalf of Democratic candidates, which was built around pocketbook issues and the need for working class solidarity.
As a candidate in 1980, however, Reagan convinced blue-collar voters he could do better than Democrat Jimmy Carter. With inflation eating away at wages and the economy going nowhere, Reagan’s promise to open the door for growth for the benefit of everyone appealed to blue-collar voters.
Moreover, Reagan was careful never to portray himself as anti-union. He constantly reminded his audiences he had been a union man for much of his adult life, which was true, and even served not one, but two terms in the Screen Actors Guild.
SAG, by the way, is a serious union, not a professional fraternity. While he fought to expel avowed Communists and other leftists from the union’s leader leadership, Reagan also was an officer when SAG joined with other unions in a series of confrontational strikes with the big studios that controlled Hollywood’s film production.
Reagan denounced the strike violence and the left-wing leadership of the union leadership but he remained an active trade unionist for another 13 years before becoming increasingly active in politics as a pro-Republican speaker and eventually the GOP’s candidate for governor in California.
Indeed, while serving as president, Reagan even called the right to belong to a union a “fundamental human right,” which is exactly the same position advocated by the United Auto Workers’ current president, Bob King.
As governor of California, Reagan also signed the law that allowed municipal workers — in other words, public employees — the right to bargain collectively.
Lou Cannon, a respected reporter for the Washington Post who wrote several books on Reagan, has said the late president’s relations with labor were complicated. “He didn’t like the fact that the unions always supported the Democrats, but it wasn’t a hostile relationship,” Cannon said in a recent interview.
“I never heard Reagan, in all the interviews, say those ‘damn unions,’” Cannon added.
In the same interview, Cannon added Reagan “was always very proud of the fact he got working class support” and estimated Reagan won over as many as one-third of union households with his unique mix of cultural, economic and patriotic messages.
At the time, union leaders such as the UAW’s Doug Fraser acknowledged support for Reagan was even higher among white, working-class voters in Michigan and other parts of the nation’s mid-section.
Other Republican candidates such as George W. Bush were mindful of Reagan’s example. Bush actively courted Teamster President James P. Hoffa both before and after the contested presidential election of 2000.
With Reagan gone, however, blue-collar voters have found the GOP’s message less appealing. The children of the Reagan Democrats still consider themselves patriots; the old social divisions of the Vietnam War are the stuff in history books and in no way germane in a working class culture today where the size of weekly paychecks have shrunk in what is now a global economy under policies widely advocated by the GOP.
Meanwhile, Republican candidates have become stridently anti-union in a way Reagan never was.
Bitter anti-union fights in Wisconsin and Ohio last year and the others unfolding in Indiana and Missouri this year may have complicated the GOP’s efforts to reach out to detached, younger working class voters, who are more interested in the old fashioned pocketbook issues that resonated with their grandparents and great grandparents way back in the 1930 when unions offered some hope for a better future and attracted young workers.
Like the idealistic Ronald Reagan.