On Wednesday, after months of delay, the United Auto Workers labor union announced that it had formally endorsed President Joe Biden's re-election bid -- an endorsement that Biden expected to receive last year but was withheld over concerns about his electric vehicle policies.
However, as UAW President Shawn Fain acknowledged in an interview, just because the union leadership endorsed Biden doesn't mean that union workers will automatically fall in line to vote for him, Newsweek reported.
In fact, the union leader further admitted to his undoubted chagrin, a substantial portion of the UAW members he leads will likely ignore the official endorsement and cast their votes in November in support of former President Donald Trump.
According to Newsweek, after the UAW's endorsement of President Biden was announced, UAW President Fain appeared on Fox News with host Neil Cavuto and acknowledged the fact that the union's member workers weren't guaranteed or required to follow union leadership in lockstep in terms of their presidential vote.
"Let me be clear about this," Fain told Cavuto. "A great majority of our members will not vote for President Biden."
"Yes, some will, but that's the reality of this," he continued. "The majority of our members are gonna vote for their paychecks, they're gonna vote for an economy that works for them."
Of course, Fain also made it clear that, at least in the view of the UAW's leadership, Trump was not an option to be endorsed or voted for because he had supposedly never "stood for the American worker" and purportedly "stands against everything we pretty much stand for."
CNN reported that President Biden proudly accepted the UAW's endorsement of his re-election campaign but also noted that, despite the support of union leadership, the incumbent will have to fight his predecessor Trump for the votes of union workers.
"Although it’s a key endorsement for Biden, the backing from union leadership may not convince all of the rank-and-file to vote for the president in November," the outlet observed. "Biden won the endorsement of the UAW in the 2020 campaign, even though many rank-and-file members supported Trump."
Indeed, according to 2020 exit polls, approximately 40% of households with a union member voted for Trump while 57% of union households voted in support of Biden.
Similarly, a post-2016 election report from The Washington Post revealed that exit polls showed that Trump garnered more than 40% of union household votes and trailed Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton by just eight points among that demographic.
That was the best performance of a Republican nominee among union worker voters since Ronald Reagan's successful 1984 re-election campaign and a stark change from the intervening election cycles in which the GOP candidates typically received less than 40% support from union households and trailed their Democratic rivals by 20-30 points among that cohort of voters.
Though there are a lot of different things that can and will change between now and the nominating conventions in the summer, much less the general election in November, it already appears to be a lock that the 2024 election will be a rematch of the 2020 election between Presidents Biden and Trump.
As things stand now, according to RealClearPolling's average of national polls, Trump is poised to potentially win back the White House and leads Biden by nearly four points, 47.3%-43.5%, with the former's numbers trending upward while the latter's are on a downward trajectory.
