If you drive past one of the Big Three’s plants in Metro Detroit, chances are you’ll see Brian Pannebecker and dozens of other auto workers stationed in the lot out front alongside a sign that reads, “Auto Workers for Trump.”
Pannebecker worked on the line for Ford, Chrysler, and Stellantis for a combined 36 years. He’s a proud United Auto Workers union member. He knows the industry inside and out, and he’s spent the past several months meeting with as many auto workers as he can to try and convince them to back former President Donald Trump this November.
This may come as a surprise to some, but that hasn’t been a tough message for him to sell.
Since launching Auto Workers for Trump in 2017, alongside 30 other UAW members, Pannebecker said his group has grown rapidly. It now includes thousands of union workers, despite the fact that UAW leadership endorsed Trump’s rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, last month.
“As word has gotten out, we started getting some of the guys who are working in the very plant that we’re demonstrating and rallying at get off their shift and walk right out to us… and start holding the signs up,” he said. “They’ve lost their fear of repercussions by the UAW bosses, because it’s just so commonplace that guys in the plants now support Donald Trump.”
Pannebecker added, “I’m not exaggerating here. Almost 90 to 95% of the trucks that drive by, whether they’re hauling automotive parts or whatever… they are blowing their air horns, giving us a thumbs-up, pumping their fist so we can see it.” Most of those truckers are Teamsters members, he noted.
He’s right about one thing: pull any guy off the line, and he’ll more than likely tell you he’s planning to back Trump. In fact, an internal poll conducted by the Teamsters found that 60% of the union’s members support Trump. Just 34% of members said they planned to vote for Harris.
The shift toward Trump among the working class is such a remarkable departure from the norm that, for the first time in decades, Teamsters leadership declined to endorse either candidate. The union, which represents more than 1 million workers across the country, consistently has backed the Democratic presidential candidate over the past several election cycles, including Joe Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien even admitted that there wasn’t a “whole lot of difference” between Harris and Biden, the latter of whom “has been great for unions.” It is a testament to Harris’s weakness among blue-collar workers—and to Trump’s growing popularity among them—that O’Brien still couldn’t find it in himself to endorse her.
It is perhaps also a testament to O’Brien’s self-awareness and his recognition that his members’ political preferences aren’t something to be dismissed and overridden.
Unfortunately, not every union leader shares O’Brien’s open mind. UAW President Shawn Fain, who likes to refer to Trump as a “scab,” is so obnoxiously anti-Trump that Pannebecker and other guys, who have been dues-paying members for decades, have had to rethink their affiliation with the union.
But at least UAW’s members know what to expect from Fain. Michigan Teamsters members, on the other hand, must have been shocked this week when the state chapter’s leadership rebuffed the union’s findings and endorsed Harris anyway. Keep in mind: Nearly 62% of Michigan Teamsters members said they back Trump, according to the poll’s state breakdown.
“Michigan Teamsters President Kevin Moore and the Executive Board, on behalf of 245,000 active and retired Teamsters, enthusiastically endorse the Harris-Walz campaign and all down-ballot Democratic candidates in the state of Michigan,” the chapter said in a statement on Wednesday, just hours after O’Brien released the Teamsters’ poll results. “We strongly support their continued commitment to the issues that matter most to working families and our nation’s middle class.”
Does Michigan Teamsters’ leadership have the slightest grasp on what those issues might be? And for that matter, does Harris?
In her many visits to the state, Harris has talked about abortion, democracy, and joy. She’s paid some lip service to unions and their workers, but has not once given a straight answer on what she plans to do to lower inflation rates, or whether she still supports the Biden administration’s green-energy agenda that has led to devastating layoffs in the auto industry. Or why, if she claims to care about the working class so much, she has not already taken action as vice president to ease their economic concerns.
Harris was given yet another opportunity to give Michigan’s workers an answer to these questions and more during a sit-down with Oprah Winfrey in Farmington Hills last week. This was her word-salad answer: “In terms of both rightly having the right to have aspirations and dreams and ambitions for your family and working hard and finding that the American Dream is, for this generation and so many recently, far more elusive than it’s been, and we need to deal with that.”
Someone should ask the Michigan’s Teamsters bosses whether they find that answer impressive. Because we all know the workers they represent don’t.
Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner, a Tony Blankley fellow for the Steamboat Institute, and a senior fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum. She grew up in Detroit and graduated from Hillsdale College. Follow her on X @KayleeDMcGhee.
