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."
This story is from the October 07, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the October 07, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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