Vice President Kamala Harris became the first Democratic presidential nominee not to receive the Teamsters endorsement in nearly 30 years, with the union declining to back a candidate after a strong majority of its rank-and-file members voted to endorse former president Donald Trump.
The union made the announcement Wednesday, saying its "extensive member polling showed no majority support for Vice President Harris and no universal support among the membership for President Trump." Just one hour earlier, however, it released that polling, which found that 59.6 percent of Teamsters voted to endorse Trump, compared with 34 percent who backed Harris.
The poll was conducted following the Republican and Democratic conventions. Its results were confirmed by a second poll that ran from Sept. 9 to Sept. 15, in which members again backed Trump over Harris, 58 percent to 31 percent.
The Teamsters, one of the country's largest unions, has historically supported Democratic candidates for president. The lack of endorsement makes Harris the first Democratic presidential candidate not to receive the union's backing since 1996, when the union declined to endorse candidates Bill Clinton and Robert Dole. Before then, they last declined to endorse a Democrat in 1988.
In a Wednesday afternoon press release, Teamsters president Sean O'Brien said the union's polling showed "no majority support for Vice President Harris and no universal support among the membership for President Trump," suggesting the union applied different standards to the two candidates.
"We strongly encourage all our members to vote in the upcoming election, and to remain engaged in the political process," O'Brien said. "But this year, no candidate for President has earned the endorsement of the Teamsters’ International Union."
When releasing the membership polling, O’Brien said the Teamsters’s 2024 endorsement would be "the most inclusive, democratic, and transparent Presidential endorsement process in the history of our 121-year-old organization."
Before President Joe Biden’s exit from the campaign, polling data from April 9 to July 3 indicated that union members preferred Biden at 44.3 percent, while Trump garnered 36.3 percent.