Troy Jackson told several hundred union members in Portland on Monday morning that workers need to go to the polls this fall to raise the minimum wage, expand family medical leave and show support for one another, as candidates across the country turned Labor Day into a parade of appeals for control of the House and Senate.
Who Gets Used, Who Gets Heard
Jackson, a longtime labor activist and logger and the Democratic nominee in Maine, used the Southern Maine Labor Council event to press his case for the U.S. Senate. He told the crowd, "Labor Day has never been just another holiday," and added, "Today, here with the people I’ve fought alongside for years, I want to make a pledge about exactly what I’m going to do in the United States Senate."
Outside the event, Doug Born, a 64-year-old union stagehand from Westbrook, said Jackson’s background as a logger and longtime support of organized labor were reasons to back him. "I think he’d be the most working class guy in the Senate. That appeals to me," Born said. "We need more union members in seats of power."
That’s the pitch, stripped bare. Workers gather. Candidates promise. The machinery of elections keeps rolling.
The Senate, the Seniority Game, the Contracts
Susan Collins had no events scheduled for Labor Day, but her campaign had been moving hard in the days before the holiday and had several stops coming up this week. She visited shipbuilder Bath Iron Works early on Sept. 1 to greet employees and promise to continue "leveraging her seniority to secure billions in destroyer contracts, infrastructure modernization, and wage enhancements," a spokesperson said in a statement.
That line says plenty about where power sits. Seniority. Contracts. Billions. The workers get greeted; the state’s war-making and infrastructure money gets brokered above them.
Jackson became the nominee in a special convention in July and is trying to unseat longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins in a race Democrats view as critical to winning Senate control. Republicans control the chamber, but Democrats see a path to taking it back if they can flip four seats and hold on in competitive states where they hold a seat. The whole contest is framed as a fight for control of an institution that keeps deciding what ordinary people must live under.
What They Call Participation
The campaigns have already been combative, busy and expensive, and they’re expected to get even more so as more voters tune in ahead of the Nov. 3 general election. The first statewide mail ballots already went out in North Carolina on Friday. Some of the busiest states are the handful with competitive Senate races, such as Maine, Ohio, Georgia and Michigan.
President Donald Trump is stepping up his own campaigning for Republicans in the coming days. His party is set to gather this week in Dallas for an atypical midterm convention, a two-day event that Trump and other Republicans hope will whip up support for the GOP, which currently controls the White House and Congress. Typically, the party in power in Washington loses seats in Congress during the midterm elections. Trump has also vowed to campaign for Republicans in important races, including Sen. Dan Sullivan in Alaska.
One of Sullivan’s opponents, Democrat Mary Peltola, was scheduled to walk in the Fairbanks Labor Day Parade on Monday. In Ohio, Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown centered his Labor Day weekend campaign on labor unions. He attended a Labor Day festival in Lorain on Sunday and other events in the state over the weekend. Brown told the crowd at the Lorain event that "the system’s rigged" against working people, and "people are working harder than ever before." He’s running against Republican appointee Sen. Jon Husted.
Violence at the Fair, Control at the Top
At a separate Ohio event, an armed assailant charged toward Democratic candidate for Ohio governor Amy Acton during a Sunday stop at the Canfield Fair and injured several people before he was stopped by troopers, authorities said. A spokesperson for Acton’s opponent, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, said in a statement that candidates "should be able to meet with voters without having to worry about threats or violence."
In Wisconsin, both major party candidates in one of the country’s most competitive House districts — Republican Rep. Derrick VanOrden and Democrat Rebecca Cooke — were joining a parade in the western part of the state. Democratic candidate for governor David Crowley was to speak Monday at events celebrating unions and organized labor in Milwaukee and Madison, the state’s two largest cities. Crowley supports overturning a state law, passed in 2011, that all-but eliminated collective bargaining for public workers. His Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, voted for that law when he was a member of the state Legislature. Tiffany was scheduled to attend a parade, a county fair and a Milwaukee-area street fair.
In Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed marched in the Detroit Labor Day Parade and was set to attend other union and labor events throughout the day. El-Sayed is running against former Rep. Mike Rogers, who spent part of the weekend campaigning in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Iowa’s Democratic nominee for governor Rob Sand and his running mate Dave Muhlbauer were set to attend Labor Day events in the state. Sand and Muhlbauer are running against Republicans Zach Lahn and Derek Wulf.
The holiday weekend showed the same old arrangement in fresh clothes: workers, unions, parades, and festivals on one side; candidates and officeholders on the other, all fighting over who gets to sit in the seats of power when the votes are counted on Nov. 3.