As the Democratic nomination circus heads to Nevada, Sen. Bernie Sanders has run into a problem. Sanders is running on a socialist platform of taking on corporations and billionaires and transferring wealth to the working class. Now, he is being bombarded with attacks from the state’s powerful Culinary Union. The reason: Union workers like their healthcare plans and want to keep them.
The backlash from unions has the potential to blunt Sanders’s momentum in a state he is otherwise expected to win. But more significantly, it’s a massive warning sign for Democrats if Sanders becomes the nominee. President Trump made great inroads with union voters in 2016, and winning them back will be central to any Democratic strategy for beating Trump in 2020.
The conflict between the culinary workers and the Sanders campaign has been brewing for a long time. The reason is that the Sanders healthcare plan would phase out all private insurance policies within four years. For decades, many unions, this one included, traded salary increases for more plush benefits. This means they would be among the biggest losers in the transition to single-payer government healthcare plan. While Sanders has tried to adjust his plan to address union concerns, he has not been able to tamp down their worries.
As the Nevada Independent explained: “The Culinary Union, which provides health insurance to 130,000 workers and their family members through a special trust fund, strongly opposes Medicare for All on the basis that it would eliminate the health insurance they have negotiated for over several decades. Health insurance provided by the Culinary Health Fund is considered to be some of the best in the state, and the union even opened a 60,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art health clinic a couple of years ago for its members.”
At a December speech in Las Vegas, Sanders was shouted down by union protesters when he tried to make the pitch for his socialized health insurance program. The Washington Examiner reported at the time that “roughly a dozen members of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 began chanting ‘union healthcare, union healthcare’ in protest.”
Ahead of Saturday’s Nevada caucus, the union started distributing fliers in Spanish and English saying that if elected, Sanders would “end Culinary Healthcare.” When the Sanders brigades savaged the union over the flier, the union shot back with a statement condemning his supporters for having “viciously attacked the Culinary Union and working families in Nevada” just because the union published facts about Sanders’s healthcare proposal.
Given the strong core support Sanders enjoys and the scattered support for the rest of the field, he is still considered the front-runner heading into Nevada. But the backlash against his healthcare plan from unions is a bad signal for Democrats should he become the nominee.
One of the factors that helped deliver the presidency to Trump in 2016 was the big gains he made among union workers. In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by 18 points nationally among union households. But Trump cut that advantage to 9 points in his race against Clinton. The swing was even more dramatic in the states that were key to Trump’s electoral college triumph. For instance, Obama beat Romney in Michigan among union households by 33 points, whereas Trump only lost those households by 13 points in 2016 — a net swing of 20.
At the heart of the Sanders electability argument is the idea that he can bring back the blue-collar workers who defected to Trump in 2016. That won’t be possible if he doesn’t figure out a way to mend fences with unions. And his destructive healthcare proposal makes that task a lot harder.
