Workers across the United States — unionized or not — are contending with higher prices for food and gasoline.

For America's unionized workforce, the overall economic picture is bleak. Threats from AI and robotics abound. Pledges by U.S. and international corporations to invest in new plants remain largely pledges. And the roughly 400,000 federal job cuts during President Donald Trump's second term have disrupted lives. Many of those jobs were previously represented by labor unions.

As a labor studies scholar, I believe weariness and wariness will accompany blue-collar voters to the polls in November. The candidates who present practical ideas for turning the economy around — and who show genuine empathy for Americans worried about paying their bills — could capture the bulk of the union vote. The stakes are amplified by a well-established pattern of midterm elections: since the Civil War, the president's party has typically lost House seats in midterms, meaning even modest defections among union households could compound Democratic gains or narrow Republican defenses.

The Union Vote

Over generations, the majority of union members have sided with Democratic candidates, even if that support has wavered since the 1970s — an era when cultural flashpoints like the Vietnam War briefly pushed many blue-collar workers toward Republicans.

The 2024 presidential campaign was no exception. Most union members voted for Democratic candidates, but at a far lower rate than in the 1960s. In 2024, union members in fact shifted toward the Democrats' nominee even as other voter groups moved away.

Why does this matter in 2026? Union voters carry outsized weight in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada — three swing states where the share of voters belonging to unions exceeds the national average of 10%. In closely contested House and Senate races, even a small shift in union votes could decide the outcome.

What's in Store This November?

The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that the percentage of U.S. unionized workers has fallen over four decades — a decline rooted in the shrinking of heavily unionized manufacturing industries, the growth of traditionally less-unionized service sectors, and state-level right-to-work laws adopted across much of the South and parts of the Midwest. In 1983, 20.1% of U.S. workers were represented by a union. In 2025, the rate was 10.0%, or 14.7 million people. Union membership among public sector workers (32.9%) is more than five times higher than among private sector workers (5.9%). In close elections, the volatility of these voting blocs matters.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to reduce consumer prices, bring back manufacturing jobs and respect workers' rights. As the midterms approach, the president's performance on those issues in the eyes of union voters will, in my view, determine which party controls the House and Senate. The signs are not promising for Trump: recent polling indicates his support among union households is eroding.

Manufacturing Jobs and Inflation

The U.S. economy has lost 75,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2025, a 0.6% decline. These jobs have steadily declined since the 1980s, so Trump's policies are not solely to blame.

Furthermore, Trump's off-again, on-again tariffs may help some U.S. manufacturers, because tariffs can erase the advantages of low-cost overseas labor. As economist Laura Veldkamp noted in July 2026, Trump's tariffs "made it more profitable for American manufacturers to set up and produce here."

The bigger problem is that even if some manufacturing returns to the U.S., the work will likely be done with the latest manufacturing technologies, which tend to reduce the need for workers. That does not bode well for significant job creation. This continues a decades-long pattern: U.S. manufacturing output has generally risen even as manufacturing employment has fallen, largely because of automation and productivity gains.

In July 2026, Moody's financial analyst Mark Zandi told Marketplace that more manufacturing output "doesn't translate into jobs." There has been more activity in the tech sector and in the defense-aerospace industries, he explained, but "these factories just don't employ a lot of people."

Additionally, Trump has not established a clear plan to lower inflation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that food prices in July 2026 were up 3.0% from July 2025 — an increase slightly above the historical average.

There is one more factor to consider. Many older blue-collar workers — many of them former union members — across New England, the Great Lakes, Ohio and western Pennsylvania remain angry about the epic industrial collapse of the 1970s and 1980s, when steel mills and factories closed in waves and communities lost anchor employers. That kind of generational suffering can show up in the voting booth in a big way, and I don't believe voter surveys and polls are able to measure the depths of this rage.

Union Representation

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 allowed government workers to unionize. But a March 2025 White House announcement said the legislation had enabled "hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management."

Through an executive order and mass layoffs across the federal workforce in 2025, Trump has presided over a dramatic change in public sector collective bargaining in Washington, D.C.

Offering guidance on the 2025 executive order, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management directed federal agencies to end their collective bargaining agreements.

In response, the American Federation of Government Employees condemned the action in an email to its members, saying the Trump administration was "illegally strip(ping) collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers." The AFGE is the largest federal employee union, representing workers across most government agencies.

Federal unions have challenged the White House's March 2025 executive order in court. In 2026, independent arbitrators have also ruled against the administration's efforts to circumvent labor agreements with some federal workers. And in June 2026, a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down an effort by the Trump administration to exercise control over union elections at federal agencies.

Whether unionized industrial workers will support their public sector counterparts remains to be seen.

Robert Forrant, Professor of U.S. History and Labor Studies, UMass Lowell. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.