Teamsters Chapters in Key Swing States Are Bucking National Leadership

Though the International Brotherhood of Teamsters refused to issue an endorsement for the 2024 presidential election, this week, local Teamsters unions coast-to-coast have challenged national leadership by issuing their own endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Altogether, regional councils representing a million Teamsters have thrown their support behind Harris for president. The most recent endorsements come from chapters in several key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.

“We decided we wanted to endorse the Harris-Walz campaign,” said Josh Zivalich, the president of the Teamsters Joint Council 75, which represents 45,000 members in Florida, Georgia, and southeastern Alabama. “We think the stakes are very high for working people, and certainly union people, and we thought it was important to make a stand.” 

Last week, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien announced the national union would not make a presidential endorsement. This comes after O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention in July and was subsequently snubbed for a chance to speak on the Democratic stage. In forgoing their endorsement for president, the Teamsters are one of the only major unions to not support Harris in November.

In its decision, the union cited division among its members nationwide. The Teamsters’ electronic member poll, which garnered over 35,000 votes, showed 59 percent of workers supporting Donald Trump and 34 percent supporting Harris. Similarly, after the Pennsylvania Conference of Teamsters endorsed
Harris on September 19, a limited informal survey showed 65 percent of its members supported endorsing Trump. But these numbers represent only a fraction of the union’s 1.3 million membership.

Another group of workers backing the Harris-Walz ticket is Teamsters Joint Council 32, which represents 85,000 members in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In their statement, they cited their appreciation for hometown hero Walz, writing, “He has stood beside us on our picket lines, listened to our concerns, and increased protections for Union workers.”

Also in the Midwest, Michigan Teamsters President Kevin Moore told local news in Detroit, “We’ve seen four years of Donald Trump. It’s the same old rhetoric and we’re not going back. Tim Walz and Kamala Harris give us a vision for all people.”

Even Fox News is coming down on Donald Trump for chickening out of a second debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.

During an interview Tuesday on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program, Fox News’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, revealed that it’s the MAGA leader—not the Democrat—who’s holding up a potential policy showdown to be hosted by the conservative media behemoth.

“The latest is, I actually believe—this is me talking—that the Harris campaign would do a Fox debate, if the former president has come to the conclusion that there really shouldn’t be another debate,” Baier said.

“Now, his reasoning, I don’t know. I always thought that it would be like a bug zapper in the backyard for the former president in that he couldn’t get away from the light of 70 million viewers and that he would have to eventually, just knowing him, you know, do it if it was on Fox and something he could agree to,” Baier said.

“I’m getting the sense from his campaign that they are moving past it, and really that the holdup is not the Harris campaign and Fox, but it’s the former president,” he added, calling the whole debacle a “missed opportunity” for the former reality TV star.

In August, Trump said he would be open to going head-to-head against Harris three times before November, but his tune changed remarkably after the former prosecutor managed to thoroughly get under his skin during their first debate earlier this month.

Over the weekend, Harris accepted an invitation from CNN to debate Trump in October, though Trump said he would not be participating.

“Vice President Harris is ready for another opportunity to share a stage with Donald Trump, and she has accepted CNN’s invitation to a debate on October 23,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement released Saturday.

Hours after his first disastrous performance against Harris, Trump posted a lengthy rant on Truth Social, accusing Harris of being a “no-show” at a Fox debate he had reportedly agreed to. He also insisted that “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!”

North Carolina’s scandal-ridden Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, once suggested that prominent civil rights leader the Reverend Al Sharpton should be shot.

The Bulwark reports that back in 2009, the North Carolina lieutenant governor commented on a NewsOne article about a protest against police brutality that Sharpton took part in, writing, “If the cops wanted to shoot an elderly black man they should have shot Al Sharpton. Closing his mouth would do this Nation good.”

The publication found several other unhinged comments that Robinson made on the same website, including “Obama IS a blackface step-in fectch-it [sic] for liberal white America” and “It’s Oprah the wicked witch, leading the way to sexing up the children!”

The comments were previously unreported and made on a now defunct system, and The Bulwark was only able to find them thanks to an archive of comments made on websites using the WordPress content management system. They used Robinson’s personal email address that was known to be used on other websites, and found a trove of comments.

Sharpton, as one might expect, took exception, drawing a connection between Robinson and Donald Trump.

“This is a long line in despicable, self-hating, antisemitic rhetoric from a man who enjoys the support of Donald Trump and the Republican party,”  the civil rights leader said in a statement “Now, his candidate in that state has suggested cops shoot me instead of some other victim. It’s clear that someone’s life is expendable to them, especially if you disagree on the issues.”

Last week, CNN broke a bombshell story that Robinson had left comments on a pornography website calling himself a “Black NAZI,” expressing his desire to own slaves, and talking about peeping in women’s locker rooms. The story came on the last day that a candidate could withdraw from North Carolina’s election, and Robinson defiantly said he would stay on.

Since then, Trump has refused to disavow Robinson, even as the gubernatorial candidate’s own staff has abruptly resigned. Senator Lindsey Graham has scrambled to try and distance Trump from Robinson, as the scandal could deal a decisive blow to the former president’s efforts to win the key swing state. It seems there are some scandals that are just too much for Trump’s GOP allies.

Vice President Kamala Harris has fought to end the death penalty since 2003—but suddenly, the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign has gone mum on the issue.

Missouri’s decision to execute Marcellus Williams late Tuesday, despite the pleas from his victim’s family and the prosecutors in his case, as well as hundreds of thousands of petition signatures sent to the governor’s office calling for a commuted sentence, brought the issue back to the foreground. But despite mounting pressure, Harris’s campaign wouldn’t respond to direct questions about her current stance on human euthanization, reported Axios.

That’s a far cry from where she’s stood on the issue over the years. In her inaugural address as San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris promised to “never charge the death penalty.” She kept that promise through her time as a prosecutor—all the way through 2019, during her first run for the White House, when she included the liberal policy as part of her core agenda, promising an end to capital punishment in her criminal reform plan.

“Kamala believes the death penalty is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars,” her campaign website read at the time.

Harris’s sudden retreat from the historically liberal policy aligns with the Democratic Party’s latest stance on capital punishment—which is, apparently, that it is no longer a topic for discussion. In August, the nation’s liberal party dropped its anti–death penalty stance from its platform, marking the first time since 2004 that the DNC has failed to address the death penalty, reported HuffPost.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has gone all in on the death penalty, advocating to expand the extreme punishment to people convicted of relatively minor crimes, such as dealing drugs. During his time in office, Donald Trump executed more people than any administration in 120 years, according to the ACLU.

His obsession with capital punishment goes back to his early days as a New York City real estate developer, when he personally paid out $85,000 for full-page ads in four local papers calling for the execution of the Central Park Five—a group of teenagers who were accused of raping Trisha Meili but who were later exonerated after serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to the crime a decade later.

“I want to hate these murderers and I always will,” Trump wrote in the May 1989 ad. “I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”

“Bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!” he wrote in all caps.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is continuing to sow chaos with his spoiler campaign antics, this time in Wisconsin and New York. 

When Kennedy “suspended” his failing presidential campaign last month, he embarked on a new quest to see Donald Trump elected, by attempting to stay on the ballot in states where it would hurt Kamala Harris and vacating in the battleground states where staying would hurt Trump.  

Already, Kennedy has seen himself scrubbed from ballots in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Ohio, and North Carolina. Now he’s set his sights on Wisconsin.

Kennedy has petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court to remove him from the ballot by having election administrators place a sticker over his name, Slate reported Tuesday. Last month, the Wisconsin Elections Commission told Kennedy he could not remove his name from the ballot, citing a law that says qualified nominees must appear on the ballot unless they die. 

Wisconsin election officials have balked at the request, which has never been tested and could potentially slow vote tabulation in Wisconsin, a crucial swing state. The circuit court that oversaw the case called Kennedy’s sticker plan a “logistical nightmare.”

Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, a Republican, also said that requiring stickers would be both a “logistical and administrative nightmare,” according to VoteBeat. 

“With over 1,800 municipal clerks statewide, uniformity of any sticker placement becomes a real concern,” Miner said. “Errant sticker placement would produce an error and return the ballot to the voter, uncounted, again sowing distrust in the tabulation and administration of the election.”

In addition to preemptively undermining both the administration and legitimacy of the election, Kennedy’s hijinks have also cost taxpayers time and money. In North Carolina, Kennedy was able to get his name off the ballot—only after thousands of them had already been printed. As a result, Kennedy delayed early voting in the state by two weeks and cost Forsyth County an estimated $16,000.

Kennedy is also asking the Supreme Court to put him back on the ballot in New York, after he was disqualified in August when a judge ruled that the former independent candidate’s connections to his New York address “existed only on paper and were maintained for the sole purpose of maintaining his voter registration and political standing” in the state.

In an emergency appeal filed Monday to the Supreme Court, Kennedy’s lawyers argued that his supporters “have a constitutional right to have Kennedy placed on the ballot—and to vote for him, whether he is campaigning for their vote or not.” The appeal is being handled by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.