With a few holdouts, Kamala Harris rides Biden wave to pick up union support

Kamala Harris is on track to wrap up support from America’s biggest labor unions, even as Republicans led by JD Vance and Donald Trump try to make a play for union voters.

The vice presidentspoke at an event held by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) on Thursday, where she thanked the teachers’ union for its longstanding support of her political career. She shouted out Randi Weingarten, the group’s president, as one of her oldest political allies, while calling herself a proud product of the public school system.

And outside of the AFT, Harris has racked up endorsements from other major national unions as well. Not waiting for another Democrat to emerge and challenge the vice president for the nomination, a slew of other unions including AFSCME, AFL-CIO and SEIU have all thrown their support behind Harris since Joe Biden stepped aside on Sunday.

Biden’s endorsement of his vice president for the Democratic nomination clearly played into this at least somewhat — the incumbent president has championed unions while in office, and throughout his own career. But there are also signs that even with Biden off the ticket, Democrats see Harris as a strong ally of organized labor.

The clearest example of that dynamic to occur so far was visible on Wednesday. As speculation mounts that he is on the shortlist to be Kamala Harris’s running mate, battleground Arizona Senator Mark Kelly made a public flip-flop on the issue of the PRO Act, a piece of pro-union legislation he refused to back under a Democratic House and Senate majority in 2021, effectively blocking it from becoming law at the time.

“I've always said I would vote for the PRO Act, and at the same time we're going to try to make it better,” he told The Independent.