In June, 2016, Scott Sauritch, the president of United Steelworkers Local 2227, a branch based in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, drove for half an hour to a union hall in Pittsburgh, where Hillary Clinton was holding a campaign rally. Sauritch was hoping that Clinton, whom the U.S.W. had just endorsed, would talk about jobs and the steel industry. Instead, she focussed on the character flaws of Donald Trump, calling him "temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified." As Sauritch listened, he grew frustrated: what did she plan to do for workers? Afterward, he told me, Clinton shook hands with supporters. Sauritch stood there in his union shirt, but Clinton didn't extend her hand to him. "Hey, Hillary," he called out, prompting her to turn around. "I'm the union president we really need your help."
He remembers her saying, curtly, "Oh, I will help," then leaving.
That November, Sauritch voted for Clinton. But this fall he's backing Donald Trump, in part because he believes that Democrats don't actually care about the working class a group defined, by pollsters, as people without college degrees. If Sauritch were still running Local 2227, he might have felt pressure to keep his decision private, since the U.S.W., like most unions, is supporting Kamala Harris. But he left his post in 2022 and is now free to speak his mind. Most of the rank-and-file workers Sauritch knows share his view, he told me, regardless of what union leaders say publicly. "I don't care what you see on TV," he said. "The grunts in the lunchroom love Trump."
Denne historien er fra October 07, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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ART OF STONE
\"The Brutalist.\"
MOMMA MIA
Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.
NATURE STUDIES
Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
Ask not just where it came from but what it does for us
THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
What is the world's largest music-streaming platform really costing us?
THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.
TALK SENSE
How much sway does our language have over our thinking?
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.