Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event at IBEW Local Union #5 on September 2 in Pittsburgh. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
UNION WEAK — Kamala Harris’ problem connecting with working-class voters finally got real this week.
On Wednesday, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced it would not endorse a candidate in the presidential election— a break with decades of precedent for the influential union, which has backed Democrats for president since the 1990s.
It wasn’t altogether unexpected. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien made waves earlier this summer when he spoke at the Republican National Convention — and was subsequently snubbed from the Democrats’ conclave in Chicago. And the Teamsters PAC earlier this year raised eyebrows when it donated$5,000 to the conservative populist Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)
In the aftermath of the non-endorsement, the Harris campaign is downplaying the snub from Teamsters leadership. A number of Teamsters locals in swing states broke with the union’s leadership and backed Harris, the campaign points out, along with the Black caucusin the union, and the West Coast caucus. All told, the Harris campaign says those Teamsters groups endorsing her candidacy add up to more than a million members.
That’s all true, but it also papers over some serious problems for Harris with working-class voters — whether in unions or not. When President Joe Biden was still in the race, a Teamsters straw poll showed him beating Trump with its union members by 46 to 37 percent. Now, 58 percent of Teamsters members overall are backing Trump, according to internal polling from the union.
That erosion in working class support can be seen in broader polls as well. In 2020, Biden lost non-college educated voters by 8 points, according to Pew, while Hillary Clinton lost them by 7 points. Now, averages of recent polls show Harris losing them by nearly 12 points,even after clawing some back with a solid debate performance.
Those shifts may suggest that most of the folks who are feeling better about Harris’ economic platform are not the working-class voters who helped deliver Democrats the Midwestern “Blue Wall” states in 2020 and 2022. Instead, they are likely professional class voters, many of them in suburbs, who have college educations but were uneasy about Biden — the fabled “Nikki Haley voter” that Democrats have been trying so hard to woo.
And that shift makes sense when you consider Harris’ economic message since she ascended to the top of the ticket, which has been squarely aimed at professional-class concerns. Whereas Biden made manufacturing and industrial policy the centerpiece of his campaign speeches — and still does as a lame duck — Harris barely mentions those policies on the campaign trail. Instead she is focusing much more on elements of the so-called “care economy,” like a child tax credit, as well as helping new homeowners and small businesses.
The Harris camp downplays that shift and argues that her economic message is more focused on lowering costs for the middle class than any element of the “care economy.” The vice president “is proud to have helped create 800,000 manufacturing jobs by casting the tie-breaking vote on historic clean energy jobs legislation and helping pass the high-tech manufacturing CHIPS bill to make us more competitive with China and the bipartisan infrastructure law,” spokesperson Lauren Hitt said.
But that statement — delivered after our article pointing out the economic pivot— is one of the few times you’ll hear the campaign or candidate talk about the Biden administration’s trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure and clean energy manufacturing. The only other time recently came when Harris touted the industrial policies near the end of the debate with Trump. But that came after a detailed outline of her other economic proposals, and was in response to a question on climate change — not the economy.
The shift away from industrial policy rhetoric worries some Democratsin the Midwest who still rely on working-class voters, particularly union members.
“Consider me in the camp pushing on our future president to keep that industrial policy front and center,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic nominee for a hotly contested U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, said after a campaign event in Macomb County, a one-time working-class bellwether that has voted twice for Donald Trump. “If you’re not talking about the economy and the future of work in the Midwest, you’re having half a conversation with the voters.”
But even if Harris does pivot back to industrial policy, it’s unclear if touting those policies will win over manufacturing sector voters who have been drifting toward Republicans in the Trump era. In Wisconsin this summer, even some factory employees who worked at facilities funded by Biden’s policies and visited by the president still told POLITICOthey planned on voting for Trump — they dinged Biden for inflation, even though they themselves received a double-digit raise this year.
While the Harris campaign may downplay those dynamics, it’s clear it understands her background as a California prosecutor and public servant may not resonate in the Rust Belt the same way Biden’s did.
Case in point: their nomination of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Midwestern stalwart with a background of supporting industrial policies and unions. At a recent Biden rally in Michigan, some union members who said they were still evaluating Harris’ economic policies praised her decision to choose Walz.
“I think [Harris] does speak to us” as union members, said Nick Ciaramitaro, a commissioner on the Michigan Civil Service Commission and former director of legislation and public policy for Michigan AFSCME Council 25. “I think Walz has helped her a lot with that.”
Harris could still overcome her difficulties with working-class voters, holding on to some with industrial policy rhetoric and adding more professional-class voters to her coalition. But long term, the situation points to the continued transformation of the Democratic Party from its roots as a working-class coalition to one based on credentialed, more educated voters. [There’s more on that in the latest episode of our podcast, POLITICO Energy].
— Feds sue pharmacy gatekeepers over high insulin costs: The Federal Trade Commission sued the three largest pharmaceutical intermediaries charged with negotiating drug prices today on behalf of insurers, claiming they are illegally maximizing profits by steering patients to high-cost insulin products. The case filed in the agency’s in-house administrative court is targeting OptumRx, Caremark Rx and Express Scripts, companies known as pharmacy benefit managers that are owned by UnitedHealth Group, CVS and Cigna.
CRYPTO!
— Constellation to restart Three Mile Island nuclear plant in deal with Microsoft: Power giant Constellation Energy announced today that it had inked a 20-year deal with Microsoft to supply power to an AI data center from the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, the latest sign of a revival for the nuclear sector driven by the voracious energy demand from the technology industry. The agreement — which would restart a reactor at the plant that was closed in 2019 and slated for decommissioning — comes as major tech companies scramble to secure reliable carbon-free power supplies to run their power-hungry data and artificial intelligence centers.
THIS DEFINES HOW WARPED TRUMP IS TO DEMAND A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN OVER HIS TEMPER TANTRUM!
— House Republicans work to defuse Trump as they defy shutdown demands: House Republicans are typically hesitant to defy Donald Trump. But on the latest federal spending standoff, GOP lawmakers are telling their presidential nominee that his approach won’t work — and rebuffing his demands to shut down the government if they don’t get a partisan immigration bill. Trump wanted to use the issue as a cudgel in the final throes of his presidential campaign as he calls the security of elections into question — an echo of his false claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election. But Speaker Mike Johnson and leading appropriators have made it clear they aren’t willing to risk their House majority on a shutdown that would kick in just weeks before Election day.
Nightly Road to 2024
JILL STEIN HAS NEVER HELD ELECTED OFFICE...RAN FOR MASSACHUSETTS GOVERNOR & IT WAS APPARENT THAT SHE WAS NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME...SHE NEVER FOLLOWED THROUGH ON HER CLAIM TO CHALLENGE ELECTION RESULTS EVEN THOUGH ONE STATE REPORTED MORE VOTES FOR TRUMP THAN THERE WERE REGISTERED VOTERS....
YOU’RE OUT — The Supreme Court has turned down an effort by Green Party candidate Jill Stein to have her name included on this year’s presidential ballot in Nevada. The ruling — issued this morning without explanation and without any justice publicly dissenting — is a win for Democrats, who feared Stein would sap support from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the important swing state.
DEWINE POKES THE BEAR — Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine continued his criticism of former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vancein a guest essay published in The New York Times on Friday for amplifying false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. “As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield,” DeWine wrote. “This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.”
PERSONA NON GRATA — North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinsonwill not speak or appear at former President Donald Trump ‘s rally on Saturday in the eastern part of his state following a CNN report about his alleged posts on a pornography website’s message board, two people familiar with the matter said Friday. Robinson is not expected to attend the event in Wilmington, according to a person on the Trump campaign and a second person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning.
Robinson has been a frequent presence at Trump’s North Carolina campaign stops. The Republican nominee has referred to Robinson, who is Black, as “Martin Luther King on steroids” and long praised him. But in the wake of Thursday’s CNN report, the Trump campaign issued a statement that didn’t mention Robinson and instead spoke generally about how North Carolina was key to the campaign’s efforts.
AROUND THE WORLD
Tunisians take part in a protest against President Kais Saied ahead of the upcoming presidential elections in the capital Tunis. | Anis Mili/AP
PRISON POPULISM — One of the candidates challenging Tunisian President Kais Saied in the country’s presidential election next month has been sentenced to prison on fraud charges that his attorney decried as politically motivated, reports The Associated Press.
Two weeks after his arrest, a court in the city of Jendouba handed down a 20-month sentence for Ayachi Zammel on Wednesday evening, after convicting him of falsifying the signatures he gathered to file the candidacy papers needed to run for president. Zammel faces more than 20 charges in jurisdictions throughout Tunisia.
The little-known businessman and head of Tunisia’s Azimoun party is one of two candidates challenging Saied in the North African nation’s Oct. 6 election. His attorney Abdessattar Messaoudi said Zammel planned to conduct his campaign from behind bars .
“We see NATO stepping up drills related to possible crises in the Arctic,” Sergey Lavrov said, according to Russian state media, in comments for a documentary series that were first reported today. “Our country is fully ready to defend its interests militarily, politically and from the standpoint of defense technologies,” he added.
His comments mark the latest round of saber-rattling by the Kremlin, which has repeatedly threatened to unleash nuclear war on NATO and its allies in recent years.
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Nightly Number
€35 billion
The size of a loan ($39.1 billion) that the European Union will extend to Ukraine , European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced today. The loan is part of the G7 countries’ pledge this July to support Kyiv for the long term with arms deliveries and recovery aid.
RADAR SWEEP
PROMISES KEPT — In April of 2019, Notre-Dame de Paris caught on fire. The medieval Catholic cathedral, a crown jewel of Paris, was fully ablaze — and for a second, it looked like one of the most grand and marvelous landmarks on earth was going to be lost to time. But five years later, and after almost $1 billion was promised or donated to reconstruction efforts in the days after the fire, Notre-Dame stands again, open to visitors and fully restored . For GQ, Joshua Hammer took a deep dive into the process, the years and the people at the heart of it. What does it take to rebuild a monument, almost from scratch?
Parting Image
On this date in 1994: A U.S. hovercraft makes its way to shore on the northern coast of Haiti at Cap Haitien. U.S. forces moved into the northern part of Haiti, one day after landing in Port-au-Prince as part of a military action to remove Haiti's military regime, three years after a 1991 coup. | Rick Bowmer/AP
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(The Conversation) – The melting of one of North America’s largest icefields has accelerated and could soon reach an irreversible tipping point. That’s the conclusion of new research colleagues and I have published on the Juneau Icefield, which straddles the Alaska-Canada border near the Alaskan capital of Juneau.
In the summer of 2022, I skied across the flat, smooth and white plateau of the icefield, accompanied by other researchers, sliding in the tracks of the person in front of me under a hot sun. From that plateau, around 40 huge, interconnected glaciers descend towards the sea, with hundreds of smaller glaciers on the mountain peaks all around.
Our work, now published in Nature Communications, has shown that Juneau is an example of a climate “feedback” in action: as temperatures are rising, less and less snow is remaining through the summer (technically: the “end-of-summer snowline” is rising). This in turn leads to ice being exposed to sunshine and higher temperatures, which means more melt, less snow, and so on.
Like many Alaskan glaciers, Juneau’s are top-heavy, with lots of ice and snow at high altitudes above the end-of-summer snowline. This previously sustained the glacier tongues lower down. But when the end-of-summer snowline does creep up to the top plateau, then suddenly a large amount of a top-heavy glacier will be newly exposed to melting.
That’s what’s happening now, each summer, and the glaciers are melting much faster than before, causing the icefield to get thinner and thinner and the plateau to get lower and lower. Once a threshold is passed, these feedbacks can accelerate melt and drive a self-perpetuating loss of snow and ice which would continue even if the world were to stop warming.
Skiing across the flat plateau area of Taku Glacier on Juneau Icefield, in summer 2022. Bethan Davies
Ice is melting faster than ever
Using satellites, photos and old piles of rocks, we were able to measure the ice loss across Juneau Icefield from the end of the last “Little Ice Age” (about 250 years ago) to the present day. We saw that the glaciers began shrinking after that cold period ended in about 1770. This ice loss remained constant until about 1979, when it accelerated. It accelerated again in 2010, doubling the previous rate. Glaciers there shrank five times faster between 2015 and 2019 than from 1979 to 1990.
Our data shows that as the snow decreases and the summer melt season lengthens, the icefield is darkening. Fresh, white snow is very reflective, and much of that strong solar energy that we experienced in the summer of 2022 is reflected back into space. But the end of summer snowline is rising and is now often occurring right on the plateau of the Juneau Icefield, which means that older snow and glacier ice is being exposed to the sun. These slightly darker surfaces absorb more energy, increasing snow and ice melt.
Gilkey Glacier, Juneau Icefield: as the glaciers thin, more bare rock is shown, and less heat is reflected back into space. Bethan Davies
As the plateau of the icefield thins, ice and snow reserves at higher altitudes are lost, and the surface of the plateau lowers. This will make it increasingly hard for the icefield to ever stabilise or even recover. That’s because warmer air at low elevations drives further melt, leading to an irreversible tipping point.
Longer-term data like these are critical to understand how glaciers behave, and the processes and tipping points that exist within individual glaciers. These complex processes make it difficult to predict how a glacier will behave in future.
The world’s hardest jigsaw
We used satellite records to reconstruct how big the glacier was and how it behaved, but this really limits us to the past 50 years. To go back further, we need different methods. To go back 250 years, we mapped the ridges of moraines, which are large piles of debris deposited at the glacier snout, and places where glaciers have scoured and polished the bedrock.
The same area in old aerial photos and a recent satellite image. Davies et al / Nature Communications
To check and build on our mapping, we spent two weeks on the icefield itself and two weeks in the rainforest below. We camped among the moraine ridges, suspending our food high in the air to keep it safe from bears, shouting to warn off the moose and bears as we bushwhacked through the rainforest, and battling mosquitoes thirsty for our blood.
We used aerial photographs to reconstruct the icefield in the 1940s and 1970s, in the era before readily available satellite imagery. These are high quality photos, but were taken before global positioning systems made it easy to locate exactly where they were taken.
A number also had some minor damage in the intervening years – some Sellotape, a tear, a thumb print. As a result, the individual images had to be stitched together to make a 3D picture of the whole icefield. It was all rather like doing the world’s hardest jigsaw puzzle.
Work like this is crucial as the world’s glaciers are melting fast – all together they are currently losing more mass than the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets, and thinning rates of these glaciers worldwide has doubled over the past two decades.
Our longer time series shows just how stark this acceleration is. Understanding how and where “feedbacks” are making glaciers melt even faster is essential to make better predictions of future change in this important region
The Conversation is an independent, not-for-profit media outlet that works with academic experts in their fields to publish short, clear essays on hot topics.
Lakes, rivers, springs, and estuaries in Florida suffer from blue-green algae blooms that often produce harmful substances called cyanotoxins. These toxins can pollute water, contaminate seafood, and injure and sicken people — and may even harm wildlife like brown pelicans, American alligators, and endangered smalltooth sawfish.
Better water-quality standards would help Florida identify dangerous blooms and curtail future ones. But despite a petition five years ago from the Center for Biological Diversity and allies, the state hasn't stepped up at all.
So we just petitioned again — this time on a federal level. We’re asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to use its Clean Water Act authority to set standards limiting dangerous algae toxins allowed in Florida.
Your support will make our petition more powerful.
Suit Seeks to Protect Rare Martens at Oregon Dunes
The Center just sued the U.S. Forest Service for not protecting Humboldt martens from off-road vehicles in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area — even though the Endangered Species Act safeguards the martens and their habitat there.
Humboldt martens — aka coastal martens — are stealthy, bushy-tailed carnivores in the weasel family who live only in Northern California and Oregon. They can grow up to 2 feet long but weigh under 3 pounds, eating a quarter of their weight daily to support their enviable metabolism. Believed extinct until their rediscovery in the 1990s, these martens still have a tiny population: fewer than 400.
Through nearly 15 years of unflinching legal work, we won federal protection for these martens in 2020 and, this spring, about 1.2 million acres of critical habitat — including 28,843 acres in the Oregon Dunes.
Happy news from Texas: Mountain lion hunting and trapping have just been regulated for the first time. Before this Texas was the only state — out of the 15 that have breeding populations of mountain lions — without any rules protecting them.
But that changed last week with a unanimous vote by 11 commissioners that bans “canned” (or captive) hunts of mountain lions and limits the amount of time they can be held in traps to 36 hours.
If you're a Center supporter who took action on this issue with us, thank you.
Biodiversity Briefing: Saving the Arctic
In Alaska imperiled species like polar bears, Arctic seals, whales, and caribou are fighting for survival. At the Center, we’re working aggressively to save Arctic wildlife and stop private industries — including trawling, old-growth logging, mining, and fossil fuel development — from destroying Alaska’s great wilderness.
Our newest Endangered Species Mural in Condon, Oregon, honors steelhead fish and the Gilliam Soil and Water Conservation District, which has done extensive work to restore steelhead habitat and improve streams and watersheds in the county.
The mural shows two steelhead, fish once prominent in the tributaries of the John Day River who are now threatened and fighting for survival. At 1,500 square feet, this is one of the largest murals in the Center’s Endangered Species Mural Project and was painted by Roger Peet.
Revelator: Should Tourists Swim With Sea Turtles?
Researchers in Barbados found that ecotourism encounters with endangered green sea turtles have created some very human problems for the animals.
Elephants invent individual names for each other and respond to their own names, according to a new study that’s gone viral. Researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to detect calls and responses — they hypothesize that the existence of individual vocal labels in these calls could suggest a capacity for abstract thinking.
Photo credits: Brown pelican by Andrew Morffew/Wikimedia; off-road vehicle in Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area by Matthew Tharpe/USFWS, American marten (close relative of Humboldt marten) courtesy USWFS; mountain lion by MTSOfan/Flickr; Arctic animals used with permission; steelhead mural by Roger Peet; green sea turtle by David Reid; African elephant by Arno Meintjes/Flickr.
