A column of mine a few weeks ago drew an email I’ve been meaning to answer.
I had written about the endurance of the fusionist consensus within the Republican Party, particularly in state politics. I touched on unions: “Some of the advocates of a less market-oriented conservatism think Republicans should go easier on labor unions. Meanwhile, the percentage of workers in unions keeps declining, and Republicans keep cheering the trend — and helping it along.”
A reader mentioned that passage and responded:
I think this is a lagging indicator. As the Republican party becomes more working-class, it is going to see that unions are natural allies for its voters. If it drops the union-bashing, it will finally become a majority party.
It’s an interesting theory, but I don’t see a lot of evidence that anything like that is happening. My sense is that (1) Republican activists and politicians instinctively believe that it is the decline of unions that has made their inroads among working-class voters possible in the first place and (2) this belief is correct.
On point two, see most spectacularly this 2018 study, much discussed when it came out, that suggests that “right-to-work laws reduce Democratic Presidential vote shares by 3.5 percentage points.” If that’s right, it’s a gigantic effect.