Hey everybody! Welcome back, and happy Labor Day.
Our top story today: on the one day set aside every year to honor the American worker, the man in the Oval Office is capping off a year and a half of the most sustained assault on organized labor of any modern president. Federal unions have been stripped bare, contracts have been shredded, and the working people who elected him twice are the ones hurting because of it.
We’ll also get into the map that will decide who controls Congress this November, plus a fresh look at where the fight over federal agents at the polls stands. And I want to close today by telling you honestly what it actually feels like to run for office, because I think a lot of good candidates out there right now could use hearing from someone who’s actually done it.
So do me a favor. Like this video, share it with someone who needs to see it, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Let’s get to it.
1. Trump's War on Workers
Go back to March of last year. Trump signed an executive order pulling nearly a million federal workers out of collective bargaining entirely, citing national security at agencies that have nothing to do with national security, like the IRS.
On the order’s one year anniversary this past March, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called it “the single biggest act of union-busting in our country’s history.” She wasn’t exaggerating. In the months since, the administration expanded that order again and again, most recently pulling NASA, NOAA, the National Weather Service, and the Patent and Trademark Office out of union coverage too.
Then in June, Trump went further, signing an order reclassifying career federal employees so they can be fired without due process and replaced with political loyalists. AFGE called it exactly what it is: “a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government.” The courts have mostly let this stand. The Ninth Circuit sided with the administration back in February. A federal judge in Massachusetts did push back in June, ruling the administration couldn’t control union elections at federal agencies, but that’s one narrow win against a wave of losses.
Roughly 400,000 federal jobs have disappeared since Trump took office, plenty of them union jobs. Manufacturing, the sector he promised to bring roaring back, has lost 75,000 jobs on his watch instead, partly because the factories the tariffs are luring back are built for machines, not people.
Here’s the twist nobody in the administration wants to talk about. Union membership actually hit its highest level in sixteen years this past winter. Workers facing this kind of pressure are doing what workers have always done under pressure: organizing anyway. That should worry Republicans more than any poll number does.
Now, I was one of the most pro-union Republicans in Congress, so maybe I see this differently than the rest of my old party. But here’s what they don’t get. The White House can cancel a contract with a signature. What it can’t cancel is the reason people organize in the first place. People join unions when they feel like nobody’s looking out for them. And right now, a lot of federal workers feel exactly that way.
2. Democrats Have a Real Path
Thirty five Senate seats and all 435 House seats are on the ballot this November. Republicans hold the Senate 53 to 47, so Democrats need to flip four seats to take it back, and there’s a real path to get there.
Democrats can look to Maine, where Susan Collins is fighting for her political life. North Carolina is wide open now that Thom Tillis chose retirement over another year of taking hits from Trump. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed would become the first Muslim senator in American history if he beats Mike Rogers, and the two are running neck and neck in a state Trump carried by barely more than a point. And then there’s Texas, where James Talarico is leading Ken Paxton. A Democrat leading in Texas.
Last Tuesday in deep blue Massachusetts, eighty year old Ed Markey beat Seth Moulton by thirty points in a primary that was never in doubt. The result isn’t the story. The turnout is. Democratic ballots ran about a hundred thousand ahead of the last midterm primary. Republican ballots ran behind. One side of this country is showing up early, and it isn’t the president’s side.
Now watch how the people in power are responding. Tarrant County, Texas, the battleground county at the center of that Senate race, just voted on party lines to close 92 polling places for November. Nearly a third of the county. Two million people, Fort Worth, Arlington. They say it’s about saving money. Sure it is.
And last week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin finally gave us a partial answer on whether federal agents will show up at the polls. He says ICE will only be there if there’s “a threat to that polling place,” or if agents are serving a warrant regarding someone “we have been actively tracking down.”
I have to be honest, that doesn’t really put my mind at ease. Who decides what counts as a threat? We’ve seen these people treat peaceful protesters as a threat and treat violent rioters as peaceful protesters.
So that’s the state of play. The votes are out there. The energy is out there. And Republicans are scared.
3. What Running for Office Is Really Like
In the spring of 2009, I came home from my third deployment to Iraq and decided to run for Congress against an incumbent, in a district I had no business winning. I spent that whole summer doing what every first time candidate does: dialing for dollars for hours a day, driving myself to county fairs and VFW halls, sleeping four or five hours a night, and wondering more than once if I’d completely lost my mind.
I won that race, but I want to be honest that winning isn’t what made the sacrifice worth it. The satisfaction came from knowing why I was running in the first place, and holding onto that on the days when the polling or fundraising numbers weren’t looking great. See, from the beginning, I wanted to run as a candidate who, if elected, voters could trust to uphold the oath to the Constitution a member of Congress swears to. Over a decade later and a Trump presidency in between, I retired from my time in Congress and walked away with the same sense of service over self that I launched my first campaign with.
So to every candidate out there right now, my advice is simple. Remember why you’re running. Not the talking points version. The real one. The reason that made you fill out the paperwork in the first place, and carry that with you each day out on the trail.
