How Michigan’s key union voters are making up their minds: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, national political reporter Ben Kamisar breaks down the latest NBC News Deciders Focus Group series on union voters in Michigan. Plus, No Labels ends its bipartisan presidential efforts.

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How Michigan’s key union voters are making up their minds between Biden and Trump

By Ben Kamisar

The battle for union voters in Michigan has taken center stage this year, as Joe Biden and Donald Trump seek to sway this large and important voting bloc in a key battleground state.

And for many of these voters, their political affiliation comes well before their union affiliation.

That was the takeaway from the latest NBC News Deciders Focus Group series with union-affiliated voters in the state, conducted with our friends from Engagious, Syracuse University and Sago. Polling shows Biden with a slight edge among union-affiliated voters nationwide after he won them by double digits in 2020, and he’s earned endorsements from leaders of major unions, including the United Auto Workers. But our focus group participants were almost evenly divided between Biden and Trump.

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Not one of the 15 focus group participants said Trump’s policies were pro-union. That didn’t matter to the former president’s backers, some of whom argued their candidate was pro-worker, not pro-union.

“I think he’s pro-get-people-back-to-work, it doesn’t matter if you’re union or not. … He wants companies to make money, and then their workers