The Hill
Poll: Trump support among union members has fallen 15 points
By John Bowden May 4, 2018
President Trump’s support among America’s union workers has dropped 15 points in just a year, according to a Reuters–Ipsos poll released Friday.
The president enjoyed an all-time high of more than 60 percent support among union workers in the same poll last March, an unusually strong number for a Republican.
But his support among the demographic has dropped steadily nearly every month since then, Reuters reports, despite his pursuit of trade tariffs that labor unions have traditionally supported.
Trump’s support among union workers now sits at 47 percent, down from its all-time high of 62 percent, according to the poll. April numbers have not yet been released.
A graph released by Reuters notes that Trump tended to win union supporters in areas of the country, such as the Southwest and the Carolinas, where union workers make up a smaller percentage of the overall workforce.
Democrats are working hard to win back union voters, a bloc that has typically been a stronghold for them, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. Party strategists are hoping to avoid a repeat of 2016, which saw many union workers flipping from supporting President Obama just four years earlier to supporting Trump.
“There was a collapse of union support,” said former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won 8 percent more of the union vote than Trump in 2016, a victory that was still a significant double-digit drop in support from unions’ support for Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.
Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, won a 30-point advantage among union households in 1992 during his successful run for president.
The Reuters–Ipsos poll contacts 902–1,558 union members every month, and carries a margin of error of 3–4 percentage points for union member questions.