Copley News Service, November 1, 2006, Wednesday

Copyright 2006 Copley News Service
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Copley News Service

November 1, 2006 Wednesday 7:22 PM EST

SECTION: DAILY NEWS

HEADLINE: Ohio gets top billing as organized labor seeks to muster support in midterm elections

BYLINE: Finlay Lewis

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

BODY:
Top AFL-CIO officials said on Wednesday that Ohio may be the key to their strategy for electing a Democratic Congress as union volunteers step up last-minute efforts to mobilize their troops for next week's election.
With exit poll data indicating that union households accounted for about 35 percent of the total vote in the Buckeye State during the 2004 presidential election, Karen Ackerman, political director of the AFL-CIO, told a telephone press conference, "Ohio certainly is at the top of our list."
Touting the federation's voter turnout effort, Ackerman said volunteers during the campaign's closing days would be targeting 1.4 million registered union voters statewide, adding, "We maintain we are the largest political organization (in Ohio). No one comes close - in terms of turnout and in terms of the potential union vote."
Along with dissatisfaction over the war in Iraq and a host of economic issues, William Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, said that government corruption in Columbus and a statewide ballot proposal to raise the minimum wage by $1.70 to $6.85 an hour next year would help to swell a blue-collar turnout to the benefit of Democratic candidates for governor, U.S. Senate and the U.S. House.
Still smarting from an impressive Election Day effort by Republicans in Ohio and elsewhere during the presidential race two years ago, Burga vowed that union political strategists had learned from their past mistakes and would have the upper hand next week.
"I just think it's working so much better this year. After we did 2004 we went back to the table and made some changes," Burga said.
Among those misjudgments was the massive importation of union organizers from outside Ohio during the 2004 campaign - an error that the GOP exploited to its advantage in relying heavily on local volunteers familiar with their neighbors and local geography. This time, Burga said, most of the workers are Ohioans with intimate knowledge of the targeted neighborhoods. In all, he said, the plan calls for amassing a small army of 3,000 volunteers on Election Day.
Ackerman and Burga said that labor's resources have been invested in a beefed up "microtargeting" effort that involves amassing enormous amounts of computerized data aimed at identifying potential voters supportive of Democratic candidates. Among other objectives, labor's strategists are zeroing in on an estimated half-million union voters in Ohio who typically show up at the polls only during presidential elections.
"Our microtargeting system really enables us to pinpoint the votes that we know we need to turn out," Ackerman said.
Overall, the AFL-CIO will be tailoring its Election Day efforts to attract an estimated 13.4 million union voters nationwide.
Organized labor's campaign war plans have taken shape 18 months after the AFL-CIO was split by a dispute over priorities. Seven unions ultimately abandoned the federation to set up a rival body, dubbed the Change to Win coalition, to focus on expanding the union movement to unorganized sectors of the economy.
The walkout triggered speculation within union and political circles that organized labor's ability to mobilize its members on Election Day would suffer at the expense of the Democratic Party, which over the years has grown reliant on its allies in the union movement to get blue-collar supporters to the polls. The result seems to be the opposite, observed Richard Hurd, a labor expert at Cornell University.
In the industrial states of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania - scene of some of the nation's most hotly contested races - labor political activism may actually be at a new high, Hurd suggested.
"One way of looking at it is you have an increased overall effort because Change to Win is there also, pushing their members in a coordinated way - and with more coordination and involvement of the different unions than historically has been the case," he said.
The breakaway affiliates represent about 231,000 unionized workers in Ohio. Burga acknowledged that the loss of dues revenue has depleted the AFL-CIO's coffers. But he said the political effort remains largely unaffected.
"They are participating to some extent, but it hasn't changed our program by their nonaffiliation," Burga said, referring to the CTW.
For example, he said that the state Service Employees International Union - now a CTW member - has joined forces with the AFL-CIO for the Ohio election effort. Among other things, the SEIU has made available a computerized telephone dialing system for use in a massive phone bank program designed to identify and win over union voters.
Colleen Brady, the national political director for CTW, said: "You don't see a national or a local schism. (The AFL-CIO and the CTW) are working together where it makes sense to work together. This is not about a fight within labor."