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The Wall Street Journal, Kyle Jenkins talks to Tracie Sharp of the conservative State Policy Network:
Anyone wondering whether an advantage in the states truly matters should look at this year’s Electoral College map. In Wisconsin, union membership is down 133,000 since 2010, the year before Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 overhaul passed. Donald Trump’s margin of victory there? Less than 30,000. In Michigan, public-union membership is down 34,000 since 2012, the year before Gov. Rick Snyder’s right-to-work law kicked in. Mr. Trump’s margin? Only 11,000.
Ms. Sharp says she had always felt these two states were only “thinly blue,” and that the GOP has been put on better footing by the unions’ slide. “When you chip away at one of the power sources that also does a lot of get-out-the-vote,” she says, “I think that helps—for sure.”
It is not that former union members suddenly stopped voting Democratic. Rather, they were no longer part of union mobilization and fundraising efforts. The weakening of those efforts probably hurt Democrats in the industrial states.
