The Teamsters President Is Out of His Depth

O’Brien won’t let this go. According to the non-endorsement, “Neither candidate promised not to intervene to force similar RLA contracts.” Just to be clear: There is no major-party presidential candidate who ever would make such a promise.

The 14-member Teamsters board could not bring itself to endorse either candidate. But Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect reports that eight rank and filers who were invited to attend the board’s meetings with Harris, Trump, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. felt differently. They all said they were for Harris. The text of the non-endorsement makes proud reference to these rank and filers’ participation, referring to the union’s interrogations as “rank-and-file roundtable interviews” and “rank-and-file presidential roundtables.” But no word is mentioned that these emissaries from the real world told the board to endorse Harris, and that the board ignored them. The fix was in.

What did the broad membership want? The Teamsters conducted a few internal polls that produced contradictory results. The first was a series of straw polls conducted by 300 union locals from April 9 to July 3, before Biden quit the race. These polls had Biden leading Trump, 44 to 36 percent. After Biden withdrew, the Teamsters commissioned a second membership poll from July 24 to September 13, overseen by an unnamed “independent third party.” Union members were invited to participate through a Q.R. code on the back of the Teamsters’ quarterly magazine. In that poll, the results flipped: Trump led Harris, 60–34 percent, leaving some Harris supporters scratching their heads. Was Trump’s lead legit?