Teamsters President Sean O’Brien is navigating an internal revolt over the union’s decision not to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, with local chapters rushing to endorse her anyway.
The Teamsters executive board voted to stay neutral in the presidential race on Wednesday, upending decades of precedent. In every election since 1996, the union has endorsed the Democratic candidate for president.
O’Brien said that “neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to the union,” largely made up of truckers and warehouse workers, in explaining its choice. But the announcement did not sit well with some Teamsters leaders.
Around two dozen councils from Wisconsin to Nevada have endorsed Harris in defiance of the national organization. Kevin Moore, the president of the Michigan Teamsters, greeted her on a tarmac Thursday in Detroit after extending his support.
“In Michigan, we understand this is a blue-wall state,” Moore told WXYZ, an ABC affiliate in Detroit. “We’ve seen four years of Donald Trump. It’s the same old rhetoric, and we’re not going back.”
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Chapter leaders, representing hundreds of thousands of members nationally, have softened the political black eye for Harris, who days earlier interviewed with the Teamsters at the union’s Washington headquarters.
On Friday, the Harris campaign celebrated the endorsement of the Pennsylvania Conference of Teamsters.
But the leaders have also exposed a growing rift within the labor movement over how to handle rank-and-file support for Trump. Fifty-eight percent of Teamsters back the former president, compared to 31% for Harris, according to a member survey O’Brien released on Wednesday.
O’Brien, who took over the Teamsters in 2022 with a promise to increase member input, acknowledged the poll factored into his nonendorsement. But labor leaders say he is sitting on the sidelines when there is only one clear choice for president.
Harris has promised to sign pro-labor legislation broadly rejected by Republicans as harmful to small business. Meanwhile, Trump has made overtures to the working class, including a series of tax giveaways, but generally holds a more corporate-friendly stance.
The backlash to O’Brien has been brewing for months. The Teamsters’ National Black Caucus endorsed Harris in August, and some local chapter leaders denounced him for his neutrality before Wednesday.
But the infighting has only grown more bitter since he made that neutrality formal. On Thursday, James Hoffa, the longtime former president of the Teamsters, called the nonendorsement a “failure of leadership,” prompting an angry swipe from O’Brien.
“We will not focus on the shortcomings or short-sighted opinions of one weak predecessor,” Teamster spokeswoman Kara Deniz said of Hoffa in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “We will make this union stronger and more influential by putting our members first.”
The Teamsters’ membership had been less divided over President Joe Biden. In fact, the rank-and-file supported his candidacy over Trump’s 44% to 36%, according to O’Brien’s polling.
But O’Brien was noncommittal on Biden, too, before he exited the race. Instead, he has made outreach to Republicans a priority.
O’Brien visited Mar-a-Lago in January and later spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in Milwaukee. He received no such invitation from the Democrats.
Trump ultimately failed to win the Teamsters’ endorsement despite tax break proposals on overtime and tip wages meant to signal his departure from GOP orthodoxy. O’Brien, who condemned seemingly anti-labor remarks Trump made to X CEO Elon Musk in August, based his decision in part on Trump’s refusal to oppose “right to work” laws.
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Harris, he said, did not assure him adequately that she would not intervene in labor strikes, like what Biden did with the rail industry in 2022.
“No endorsement, I think, sends a message to both parties that, if they truly want to support working people, they have to reevaluate it and understand that nothing is given. It is earned,” O’Brien told Fox News following Wednesday’s announcement.
