(DCNF)—The shift toward populism across the American electorate has both parties chasing working-class voters as if they were a prize swing state in a presidential election. That competition is healthy. Meaningful contrasts still matter.
What’s not good is the practice, unchanged for decades, that presents big labor bosses as though they spoke for the interests of America’s working men and women. The new reality is that while union leaders are almost uniformly Democrats, union households are politically mixed. National 2024 exit polls found Kamala Harris winning those households 53 percent to 45 percent. That’s an eight-point Democratic edge, but only half of former President Joe Biden’s 16-point margin four years earlier.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, won white union-household voters without a college degree, and by a wide margin. Pew has found that union members lean 60–40 Democrat. That’s probably expected, given the only place where union membership is growing is in the public sector.
The shift toward populism across the American electorate has both parties chasing working-class voters as if they were a prize swing state in a presidential election. That competition is healthy. Meaningful contrasts still matter.
What’s not good is the practice, unchanged for decades, that presents big labor bosses as though they spoke for the interests of America’s working men and women. The new reality is that while union leaders are almost uniformly Democrats, union households are politically mixed. National 2024 exit polls found Kamala Harris winning those households 53 percent to 45 percent. That’s an eight-point Democratic edge, but only half of former President Joe Biden’s 16-point margin four years earlier.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, won white union-household voters without a college degree, and by a wide margin. Pew has found that union members lean 60–40 Democrat. That’s probably expected, given the only place where union membership is growing is in the public sector.
Democrats are increasingly the party of government, literally and figuratively, but union voters are not a monolith. What’s puzzling is the way the political machines of both parties still behave as though they were.
Akash Chougule, the president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, puts the mismatch bluntly: roughly 45 percent of union households voted Republican in 2024, while about 87 percent of union political spending benefited Democrats.
The first figure tracks the Edison/CNN household exit poll. The second is consistent with OpenSecrets and FEC patterns: building-trades contributions in the 2024 cycle ran about 88 percent Democratic; large public-sector PACs often exceed 95 percent. Individual industrial unions run even more lopsided. The American Accountability Foundation’s Tom Jones told Congress that BLET’s PAC sent 98.97 percent of its party-committee dollars to Democrats — $506,581 to $5,250 — “in 2024, after it was obvious to everyone that rail workers were voting for President Trump.” SMART-TD’s pattern was similar. “A political program that gives 97, 98, or 99 cents of every dollar to one party is not a labor program,” Jones said. “It is a party operation on union letterhead.”
Jones’s larger claim is that the treasuries no longer function mainly as bargaining tools. “These industrial unions now function, for practical purposes, as a financial subsidiary of the Democratic Party, even as their own members have moved decisively in the other direction.” He pointed to LM-2 filings showing millions for casinos, resorts, sports sponsorships, and executive pay — “that does nothing to improve a single member’s wages, hours, or working conditions.” SMART-TD, he noted, gave $300,000 to the Blue Green Alliance and funded Jobs With Justice and Working Partnerships USA. “The men and women on the railroads and the factory floors do not know that $3.9 million of their union’s treasury went to Caesars, or that their PAC’s largest check went to EMILY’s List, because their leadership has no interest in telling them.”
Republicans are not innocent of the proxy problem. As they chase union voters, they wine and dine union bosses, confusing their priorities and signing onto favored mandates even when they collide with a deregulatory, affordability or innovation agenda. On June 9 of this year, the Faster Labor Contracts Act passed the House 230–193 by discharge petition, carried by 20 Republican votes. It forces employers to the table within 10 days of a union’s request and, after a short clock of talks and mediation, lets a three-member panel impose a binding two-year contract that neither the workers nor the employer ever voted on.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien called it “one of the most consequential labor bills to come before Congress in generations.” Months earlier, the Protect America’s Workforce Act passed on a similar 20-Republican discharge path. The Railway Safety Act was folded into surface-transportation reauthorization. “Each was sold as bipartisan and pro-worker,” Jones testified. “Each transferred power and money to the same leadership whose spending I have just described.”
Rail is the cleanest illustration. Lawmakers in both parties invoke rail workers when they want moral cover. Some of what those workers want — safe staffing, predictable schedules, respect on the job — belongs at the bargaining table or in a safety case with evidence. Statutory mandates lock in leadership’s wish list, converting workplace disputes into political issues. Moreover, Jones’s data shows the people who cut the PAC checks don’t necessarily speak for those who have dues taken out of their paychecks.
“Take even the number most favorable to union leadership,” Jones says, “and four in ten of their members voted for President Trump. Yet these unions directed 97, 98, and 99 percent of their political dollars against those members’ chosen candidate.”
“For decades the conservative instinct has been to treat the union boss as the gatekeeper to the union member: earn the endorsement, win the members,” Jones said. “The gate no longer works. The members have already moved.”
With both parties claiming to represent the working class, there’s a simple test to see which does. Stop treating the lobbyist as the worker. Ask the people who pay the dues whether the political program bought with those dues matches their priorities — manufacturing, energy, borders, take-home pay — or only the priorities of the people who spend the money in Las Vegas and at the Democratic Governors Association. Hearings are how they find out. Representation starts by standing with members, not negotiating with the names on the letterhead.
A veteran journalist formerly on staff at U.S. News & World Report, UPI, and other outlets, Peter Roff regularly produces commentary on current political and public policy matters for domestic and international outlets. You can reach him at RoffColumns AT GMAIL.com and follow him on social media @TheRoffDraft.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
