President Biden met with the Teamsters union in Washington on Tuesday, in his latest effort to shore up support from labor unions, as he works to make inroads among working-class Americans whose votes could shape the election in November.
Both Biden and former president Donald Trump have been competing for that endorsement, in an effort to position themselves as allies of the working-class. The Teamsters met with Trump in January and with a handful of other candidates across the political spectrum last year.
“The President appreciated the opportunity to discuss his historic, pro-union record with the Teamsters,” a Biden campaign spokesman said, and “hope[s] to earn the support of the Teamsters.” Biden met with union leaders and members at their headquarters in Washington.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien previously said that the union “realizes that President Biden’s time is limited, and we appreciate that he is making it a priority to meet with Teamsters.”
On Tuesday, Biden and Teamsters members and leaders discussed the remarkable past year for unions, the importance of protecting Social Security and Medicare, and the Butch Lewis Act, which Biden signed into law in 2022 preventing cuts to the retirement accounts of hundreds of thousands of Teamsters, the campaign spokesman for Biden said.
The Teamsters’ meeting with Biden — the self-proclaimed “most pro union president in history”— comes on the heels of his fiery State of the Union address, where he stressed his achievements for labor.
The Teamsters’ endorsement has outsize political ramifications for Biden in key battleground states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where the Teamsters has significant membership. Biden likely needs to win all three states to secure a victory in November, which he narrowly did in 2020. Trump’s surprise victories in these states in 2016 played a key role in propelling him to the White House.
“The Teamsters are incredibly important to President Biden,” said Steve Rosenthal, a Democratic political strategist in the labor movement for decades. “They have a unique ability to mobilize their members at the ground level, and they have enormous credibility on jobs, the economy, retirement security, pensions, health care and prescription drugs not only with their members but in union households and [beyond].”
Last year, the Teamsters rallied its 340,000 members who work at UPS to threaten a strike that could have paralyzed one of the country’s largest delivery networks, resulting in a union contract that some labor experts have called the best for workers in UPS history. That strike threat, Rosenthal said, “showed Teamsters have an enormous ability to mobilize communities and do the grass-roots work it takes to win.”
With election season in full swing, union voters could be even more critical for Biden, especially if he loses ground with people of color and younger voters as some polls suggest he has. That could include a contingent of the sizable Arab American community in Michigan refusing to support Biden over his handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Trump, for his part, has long tried to sow division between union members and the Democratic Party. In September, when Biden became the first sitting president to walk a picket line — joining striking union autoworkers in Michigan, Trump held a rally at nearby nonunion auto parts plant.
Trump won more union households in 2016 than any Republican president since President Reagan, exit polls from Edison Media Research show. But in 2020, Biden secured 56 percent of union member votes compared to Trump’s 42 percent, according to AP VoteCast.
At a news conference in January, following his meeting with the Teamsters, Trump said of a Teamsters’ endorsement, “We have a good shot, I think.”
“They never had a better four years than they had during the Trump administration,” he added.
The meeting drew backlash from liberal union members, though Teamsters leader O’Brien undercut comments by Trump at the same news conference, expressing firm approval of Biden even as he left open the question of an endorsement to be decided by his membership.
“There’s no question the Biden administration has been great for unions,” O’Brien said at the time. “We still have some more questions that need to be asked to both candidates.”
The Teamsters endorsed Biden several months before the general election in 2020, and have not endorsed a Republican for president in the general election since 1988.
Throughout his presidency, Biden has frequently invoked his ties to labor unions, while straining at times to make inroads with union members. His biggest accomplishments for the labor movement include approving trillions of dollars in spending on infrastructure, semiconductor and climate packages that incentivize companies to hire union workers, and installing a lawyer at the helm of the National Labor Relations Board who has made it easier for workers to join unions.
Labor experts say these and many other Biden administration actions benefit the Teamsters, who are involved in ambitious campaigns to organize Amazon and other nonunion companies that are boosted by pro-labor policy. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.
