(Reuters circulated the following article on September 2.)
WASHINGTON — As President Bush was preparing to accept the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, the country’s labor movement was preparing to try to dump him.
With their focus on jobs, health care and worker rights, more than 15,000 volunteers were set to visit the homes of up to 1 million union members and their families in 16 swing states in an effort to persuade them that Bush has failed in all three areas, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said.
“Our members have never been more engaged and motivated as they see the effects of Bush’s policies on their lives — our union halls have been overwhelmed by volunteers,” the president of the 60-union labor federation told a news conference.
The ambitious house-to-house effort for Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry is part of what AFL-CIO officials called their biggest ever political “ground war” drive in which union campaign volunteers contact other union members and workers where they live and work.
The “ground war,” largely a get-out-the-vote drive, will consume most of the AFL-CIO’s $45 million campaign warchest as well as an undetermined amount from its affiliated unions, AFL-CIO Political Director Karen Ackerman said.
“This is a program, the scale of which is unlike any we’ve ever done before,” said Ackerman.”
With polls showing a close race between Kerry and Bush, analysts have said the outcome will be determined largely by which side is able to get core backers to the voting booths. Business groups have run similar drives for Republicans.
Sweeney said the labor movement was “99.9 percent unified behind John Kerry,” despite Wednesday’s endorsement of Bush by New York City’s main firefighters’ union. Its parent union, the International Association of Fire Fighters, was among the first unions to back Kerry.
AFL-CIO surveys have found that union households, which vote mostly Democratic, accounted for 26 percent of voters in the 2002 and 2000 elections, a voter share Ackerman said labor was likely to win again this year.
But 40 percent of union voters voted Republican in 1994, a share that shrank to 32 percent for Bush in 2000. Ackerman declined to predict the share of the union vote that Bush would get in 2004, but said “we follow it very closely and we are very pleased with where we are now.”