No, The Teamsters Did Not Vote For Trump

Let's be honest about organized labor.

I’ve had two noteworthy interactions with the Teamsters during my time as a labor organizer. The first was at a holiday party in 2022 hosted by a local Hispanic workers’ rights organization. After the dinner and speeches, the president of Teamsters Local 455, Jake, approached our DSA table. He introduced himself and explained that the union was looking to reach ‘the next generation’ (his words) by organizing new industries and younger, more diverse workers. It wasn’t a formal ask, just the start of a constructive relationship. Today, Denver DSA joins Teamsters’ picket lines, borrows their badass union hall for events, and has members salting (joining a workplace to organize it) on their behalf.

The second noteworthy event was less rosy.

I’m a volunteer organizer with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a nonprofit that helps workers start union drives and connect them with traditional unions, such as the Teamsters, UFCW, UAW, or any other groups in the pro-worker alphabet soup. A few months ago, I was assigned a unique case. During my introductory phone call with the workers, it was clear they weren’t starting from scratch. When I asked if they’d done this before, the workers told me they’d begun organizing with the Teamsters, but stopped after President Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention. According to them, their colleagues were uncomfortable with joining a union associated with the Republican Party, given its past century of anti-worker advocacy. Without disclosing their details (it’s still an active campaign), I can assure you that this workforce was not what conservatives call Woke. They’re not especially young, and most were male. It wasn’t deviation from left-wing orthodoxy that made this workforce turn away from the Teamsters, but Sean O’Brien’s coziness with a proud anti-labor politician.

Since the election, a persistent narrative has claimed that organized labor is shifting to the right. Not because the Republican Party has moderated, but because working-class Americans are now motivated by cultural issues more than economic ones. What makes this narrative unique is that all sides of the Washington D.C. bubble push it. Following Trump’s 2016 victory, J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley styled themselves as working-class Republicans, which is a Republican who votes for corporate interests but pretends to be sad about it afterwards. It helps their brand, so they employ working-class terminology whenever possible. On the Democratic side, the moneyed establishment has pledged fealty to The Abundance Agenda to combat the party’s populist left wing. Whatever one thinks Abundance began as, it’s now explicit union-busting (below). Then, of course, there’s the media, which is thrilled to have a narrative driven by both major political parties that intrigues readers and drives subscriptions.

‘I do think [union advocates] are correct to identify “abundance” as a threat to their own (wrong) vision of what the Democratic Party should be for.’ —

Josh Barro

, In Blue Cities, Abundance Will Require Fighting Labor Unions

While I hate to rain on everyone’s parade, the story of rightward-moving union members is wrong. And many of its chief proponents know this. A recent New York Times article shows how sensationalism is leading over sober analysis. The article is titled, ‘Union Leaders Get Tough With Democrats as Members Drift Toward Trump.’ Now, here’s the penultimate paragraph:

‘The disconnect between workers and leaders is not intractable. During the Biden-Harris administration, union support for Democrats spiked. But it had been falling in the years before that, and several labor voices described Mr. Biden’s term as only momentarily positive.’

The reporting literally refutes the headline. Just to give you a sense of the nonsense we’re about to delve into.

Though Trump maintained his margin with working-class White voters in 2024 and made gains with working-class minorities, the myth of rightward lurching union members is just that: a myth.¹ While Abundance Democrats and Please-Forget-I’m-A-Hedgefund-Manager Republicans are ignoring data to advance their personal politics, I cannot entirely blame them, given that the most vocal proponent of this myth is coming from inside labor’s house — Teamsters President Sean O’Brien.

O’Brien at the RNC, holding everything his sycophancy has earned American workers.

If you listen to SoB, the narrative of conservative union voters is true. According to him, after decades of neglect from both parties, workers reconsidered their options and gravitated towards cultural conservatism. With his members having a foot in each camp, SoB represented their divided allegiances by speaking at the 2024 RNC and declining to endorse a candidate. From SoB’s mouth, the bipartisan strategy sounds logical, well-thought-out, and encouraging. Good leadership should respect its members’ wishes. However, SoB is full of shit.

Last September, the Teamsters released internal polling showing their members backed Trump over Harris. An ‘electronic member poll’ found Trump winning 59.6% over Harris’ 34%, while a ‘research phone poll’ found 58% for Trump and 31% for Harris. This shocked the labor world, as months earlier, Teamsters polling had shown that membership supported Biden (44.3%) over Trump (36.3%).² The President’s cognitive decline certainly shook up the election. But many labor watchers, myself included, were skeptical that it drove a +23% swing among Teamsters members, especially considering that no other union was reporting a similar shift. Then there was the question of methodology. The first poll, which found strong support for the Democratic candidate, was conducted in person through local Teamsters halls across the country. At the time, no methodology was released for the latter polls, heightening suspicions that the process wasn’t above board. Appearing on Bari Weiss’ podcast earlier this month, O’Brien confirmed the naysayers were right to be skeptical. According to him, the electronic poll that found support for Trump justified his turn to the Republicans was conducted through a QR code in the Teamsters’ magazine — a far less scientific approach, to put it mildly.

‘We put out a QR code on a publication that goes to 1.3 million members. And we had a record turnout of people, around 180,000, who actually responded. Because look, no one reads the mail, right? But when we were pushing it out there on all our social media platforms, we got like 185,000 people to respond, which is a lot, right? And 65% of them were voting Republican. 35% or 33 point something were voting Democrat. I think the remaining were independent, or it might have been 65 - 30. You're basically representing an organization that not only is not leaning for the Democrat, which most people would assume, but is seeming to lean Republican.’

It’s worth calling out that SoB claims Trump received 65% support from these polls. At the time, the Teamsters claimed he had 59% and 58% support. So I’m unsure where the higher number comes from.

Needless to say, an in-person, organization-wide poll isn’t equal to the result found from sticking a QR code in the back of a magazine. Teamsters leadership could have conducted another in-person poll following Kamala Harris’ ascension to the nominee. The decision to rely on far less valid evidence raises the red flag. But even if we ignore all of the above and trust that the internal polling was genuine, that doesn’t explain why the rest of the Teamsters organization was staunchly opposed to the decisions of the general executive committee.

There are 1.3 million Teamsters in the United States. While the national union chose not to endorse a candidate, Teamsters locals representing 1.1 million members voted to endorse Harris.³ So while SoB was talking about a ‘right-leaning working class,’ 84% of his members were represented by halls that soundly favored the Democratic nominee over the Republican one.

“There really hasn’t been any type of action that the Republicans in Wisconsin have done that has really benefited organized labor or working families in general.” — Bill Carroll, Head of Teamsters Joint Council 39, which endorsed Harris.

Former Teamsters leadership was reportedly enraged with the non-endorsement, with former president James Hoffa calling it a ‘failure of leadership.’⁴ The union’s Black caucus was especially enraged and bucked SoB with a unanimous vote to endorse.⁵ Regardless of what one believes about the Teamsters’ dubious polling, there’s no denying that national leadership was out of step with the wishes of Teamsters rank-and-file — and organized labor as a whole. The entire ‘union workers are becoming conservative’ narrative falls apart when we examine the facts. Union voters soundly backed the Democratic nominee in the 2024 Presidential election. Exit polls showed Harris leading Trump by 12 points among union voters, while a Fox News/Associated Press post-election survey found that she won union voters by 16 points.⁶ While the story of rightward-shifting union voters generates clicks and satisfies the political and personal objectives of high-profile political actors, it is flatly untrue.

So, why is Sean O’Brien so eager to move the Teamsters to the right? I have two plausible explanations. The first affords SoB the utmost good faith. The second, which I lean towards, not so much.

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The first possible explanation for the bizarre actions of Teamsters’ leadership is that Sean O’Brien hedged his bets. Before the election, he remained open to the right in case Trump won in hopes the GOP’s vague working-class rhetoric would manifest into more favorable labor policy. While it might have been well-intentioned, this strategy was an utter failure.

Before Trump, Ronald Reagan was considered the top union-busting President for firing 11,000 unionized air traffic controllers. (Ironically, Reagan was a longtime member and head of the Screen Actors’ Guild — Union for me, but not for thee!) With a deep hatred for labor, the Gipper must be looking up at Trump with envy. In March, Trump signed an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for federal employees involved in ‘national security.’⁷ Over 430,000 federal workers at the Veterans’ Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services lost their unions overnight.⁸ Many were subsequently laid off or pressured into resignation by DOGE. In the private sector, the Trump Administration has made it impossible for workers to exercise their collective bargaining rights. Days into his term, Trump illegally fired National Labor Relations Board Member Gwynne Wilcox. The NLRB hears and settles disputes between workers and employers, but Wilcox’s departure deprived it of a quorum, making it unable to hear cases. Effectively, employers were free to violate already-weak labor law at will knowing there was no NLRB to penalize them. Trump has since tapped two nominees to staff the Board and return its function, but that might be worse in the long run. His first nominee is the former chief counsel to Trump’s appointed NLRB Chairman, and the other built his career at the notorious union-busting firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP.⁹¹⁰ These appointments might not even matter, as Trump’s favorite billionaires have advanced a lawsuit through the hard right 5th Circuit court arguing the NLRB is unconstitutional. The case is on its way to Republican-controlled Supreme Court, where our unelected Harry Potter impersonators might complete conservatism’s near-century-long campaign to scrap the New Deal.¹¹

The second explanation for Sean O’Brien’s heel turn resides in the universal truth of Occam’s Razor. The Teamsters’ president is trying to move to the right because he’s a right-winger who likes cultural conservatism, and adores the praise and attention the political right gives him. Despite the obvious failure of his boot-licking strategy, SoB is still cozying with Republicans. The organization has stepped up donations to Republican politicians, including $50,000 to the Republican Attorneys Generals Association. Even if SoB fell for Vance and Hawley’s working-class Republican nonsense, GOP attorney generals are the ones who enforce the party’s anti-worker laws in Republican-controlled states. Donating to them is like the cattle herd buying the butcher sharper knives.¹² His right-wing podcast career lends credibility to this theory, as he blatantly lies about left-wing politicians to make them look like opponents of labor while fawning over anti-worker Republicans. Here he is with Bari Weiss:

Weiss: AOC, Zohran Mamdani, we can name a can name a few others who, you would say, they're just cosplaying as like pro-labor politicians. Like they're saying all the things like we stand up for working people. That's their whole platform. Why do you say that's bullshit?

O’Brien: But do they though? This last election Joe Biden walked a picking line with the UAW. Awesome. He should’ve. I've had 250 strikes in three years. The only politician that has walked one of my picking lines has been Josh Hawley. And recently, we have a couple in Boston. You've had the whole congressional district in in Massachusetts walk it. But other than that, they've never been on picket-lines. We were fighting Amazon where we were looking for letters of support. There's people that you just mentioned that didn't sign our letters or didn't show up, yet they want to call you out on everything that they don't you don't agree with them on. They'll call you out saying, ‘He’s not right.’ Like AOC's in some like crazy DSA chat or something, whatever it is, saying Sean O'Brien shouldn't be allowed to represent the Teamsters Union.

Sean O’Brien is a fucking liar. Bernie Sanders, who SoB chastises throughout the interview, publicly joined the Teamsters’ strike in Michigan last October.¹³ He also claims AOC didn’t ‘show up’ for the Amazon Teamsters effort. Here are pictures of AOC, wearing full Teamsters gear, on the Amazon Teamsters picket line, in photos posted to the Amazon Teamsters Instagram account.

This is why I believe that Sean O’Brien simply doesn’t like the political left. His poor leadership is rightfully critiqued by people who like labor, while it’s adored by the right who wants labor to be weaker. I encourage you to go listen to the Bari Weiss interview. (It’s titled ‘How Trump Won Unions,’ which he did not.) SoB’s claims why the populist left are anti-worker are blatantly false and always ladder up to his personal issues. He claimed Sanders stopped talking to him after he spoke at the RNC (common Bernie W), and fixates on AOC’s criticism of him in ‘DSA group chats.’ None of his critiques of these politicians are based on their relationship to labor. It’s all just whining about how they’re critical of him. As they should be. Not a single vote on the Teamsters general executive board voted to endorse Trump. Yet Sean O’Brien still wanted to speak at the RNC. One could suggest he’s more interested in personal celebrity than standing up for workers, and they wouldn’t be out of pocket.¹⁴

Long time JoeWrote readers will not I’m not one to praise or defend the Democratic Party. Many labor leaders, including O’Brien, have rightfully pointed out their members aren’t seeing the fruits of supporting Democrats for so long. That’s true, and reason to aggressively support the Democrat’s left wing, who, despite their faults, are the most reliable champions for workers in contemporary American politics. The solution certainly isn’t run to the Republican Party and their media sycophants, which are actively destroying the labor movement, so Sean O’Brien can get be lauded for throwing American workers under the bus.

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In Solidarity — Joe

1. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-return-power-fueled-by-hispanic-working-class-voter-support-2024-11-06/

2. https://teamster.org/2024/09/teamsters-release-presidential-endorsement-polling-data/

3. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/local-teamsters-groups-announce-harris-endorsements-national-union-dec-rcna171984

4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/20/teamsters-jim-hoffa-harris-endorse/

5. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/13/teamsters-black-caucus-harris-endorsement-00173911

6. https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/while-other-voters-moved-away-from-the-democrats-union-members-shifted-toward-harris-in-2024/

7. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/28/politics/executive-order-collective-bargaining-national-security

8. https://prospect.org/labor/2025-08-15-union-buster-in-chief-federal-employees/

9. https://www.epi.org/policywatch/nominating-scott-mayer-as-a-member-of-the-nlrb/

10. https://www.epi.org/policywatch/nominating-james-murphy-as-a-member-of-the-nlrb/

11. https://jacobin.com/2025/08/nlrb-unconstitutional-spacex-fifth-circuit

12. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/11/teamsters-donations-00502709

13. https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/sen-bernie-sanders-teamsters-strike-marathon-refinery/

14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/20/teamsters-jim-hoffa-harris-endorse/