This union leader is the kind of voter who could swing the presidential race

Ryan Sanders is the kind of voter whose support may ultimately decide the presidential race. A resident of Erie County in Pennsylvania, Sanders describes himself as “middle of the road”: He leans conservative, but he also said he tends to oscillate between either side of the center. In his early 40s, he’s young, like many swing voters. And above all, he said he wants a presidential candidate who is “honest” — a trait consistently prized by those who remain undecided.

There’s at least one thing that separates Sanders from other swing voters, though — a proud member of Sheet Metal Workers Local 12, he’s president of the Erie-Crawford Central Labor Council (CLC), the local arm of the AFL-CIO.

Election analysts say Vice President Kamala Harris’ easiest path to victory may run through Pennsylvania, with its critical 19 electoral votes. The state has 750,000 union members — more than enough to swing the state, which Trump won by fewer than 50,000 votes in 2016. Unions are mobilizing members and their households to turn out, believing their votes will be decisive. As union members have drifted away from overwhelmingly supporting Democrats, voters like Sanders represent a key segment of the working-class voters the Harris campaign is counting on swaying.

Unions still remain strongly tied to the Democratic Party, and in their heyday, Sanders’ union ties may have predicted his vote. But declining membership over the past few decades has lessened the influence of union membership in public life. The U.S. partisan divide has crept into unions, and many voters no longer think their union identities affect their votes at all.

“There are a significant number of swing union members,” especially in Pennsylvania, said Steve Rosenthal, president of The Organizing Group, which consults with unions. He notes that according to 2020 exit polling, roughly 49% of union households in Pennsylvania voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, compared to 62% in Michigan and 59% in Wisconsin, also battleground states with deep union traditions.

Unions are spending millions of dollars to mobilize union workers to vote for Harris. Labor councils like the Erie-Crawford CLC play a key role, as they are tasked with local community engagement.

Even though he is undecided, as president of the CLC, Sanders has canvassed voters as part of the AFL-CIO’s election push in support of Harris. Sanders is a team player, but he said he believes canvassing is not very effective, as he thinks most people’s minds are already made up.

“It’s just information,” he said with a wave of his hand.

Most unions in Pennsylvania and elsewhere have endorsed Harris. The Sheet Metal Air Rail and Transportation Workers, of which Sanders’ Local 12 is a part, also endorsed the vice president, citing the “existential, anti-worker threat of another Trump presidential term.” Elsewhere in Erie, Bill McLaughlin, business manager for Local 603 of the Laborers’ Union, which represents construction workers, said he’s encouraging his members to vote for Harris because she has “their paychecks in mind.”

One reason Sanders said he hesitates to support Trump “is that he’s not as union [friendly] as Harris or Biden.” But it’s hard for him to forget that “the economy was so good” under Trump, he said. Trump inherited a growing economy from Obama, which continued to expand until the onset of the pandemic. The economy under Biden has also been strong, but tempered by high inflation, which Sanders said has cut into his paycheck. Inflation has since returned to pre-pandemic levels, but prices remain elevated. Roughly 53% of Americans rated the economy in July 2019 as “good” or “excellent,” according to a Gallup poll. In July 2024, just 22% of Americans rated the economy favorably.

But the environment for unions — a core issue for Sanders — was hostile under Trump, who visited the county on Sept. 29, one of four campaign stops in Pennsylvania within a month. The Trump administration constrained the union election process and made it more difficult for workers to win and keep unions; defended right-to-work laws — which often reduce union bargaining power in the workplace — before the Supreme Court; and attempted to undermine union apprenticeship programs by introducing and expanding employer-led ones.

Nevertheless, Trump made a pitch to union voters at his Erie rally, claiming that immigrants are “coming through the border and they’re taking your jobs,” which will “have a big effect on unions.” (Economists generally agree that immigration benefits the economy and that the strong labor market is adding jobs for both immigrants and U.S.-born workers.)

When asked if the Trump administration’s labor policies concerned him, Sanders said they didn’t really, though he admits he’s new to the union. In fact, he’s still an apprentice. His energy and friendliness helped thrust him into a leadership position in April. (“Lucky me it’s an election year,” he said drily.) And from his perspective, it’s more important that “a good economy fuels work,” he said, “even if we have to fight a little more at the negotiating table.”

He said Harris is a better friend to labor than Trump. Union supporters of the vice president view her as having a long track record of supporting labor, stretching back to her time as California’s attorney general, when she backed an initiative targeting wage theft. She served as the second-in-command to a president who declared himself the most pro-union in history.

Still, Sanders doesn’t feel like he really knows Harris or what she plans to do as president. He also emphasized that the Teamsters union declined to endorse her, which makes him feel all the more conflicted. (The union did not endorse any presidential candidate, but many local affiliates, including in battleground states, have backed Harris.)

Capital & Main reached out to both the Harris and Trump campaigns for this story, but neither provided a comment.

Over the past four presidential elections — since 2008 — a majority of voters in Sanders’ home county of Erie have chosen the winner. Indeed, Erie was one of the “pivot counties” that voted for Obama in 2012 and pivoted to Donald Trump in 2016. And in 2020, Joe Biden won by just 1,319 votes in a county of 270,000. That makes him a swing voter in a swing county. But unlike Erie County, Sanders has not backed winners. He voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Donald Trump in 2020.

Jim Wertz, former chair of the Erie County Democratic Party who is currently running for state senate, thinks the county is “fairly representative” of the whole country. He points to the diverse, urban landscape of Erie city surrounded by the county’s rural areas as a reflection of the nation’s demographics. In fact, Wertz notes, Erie has historically been a test market for new products.

Like many places in the Rust Belt, Erie County has transitioned over the past decades from being a manufacturing hub to having an economy increasingly reliant on jobs in health care, education, and the service sector. The No. 1 employer is no longer the General Electric locomotive manufacturing plant (now owned by Wabtec), but Erie Insurance.

Still, the Erie metropolitan area has seen union membership increase since just before the pandemic, as the percentage of workers covered by unions rose from 12% in 2019 to 15% in 2023 — much higher than the national average of 10%. Since 2020, workers in Erie have unionized at a local television station, a facilities management company, and a nursing home. Plus, union jobs have been added in manufacturing and other private industries.

Federal infrastructure investments may be poised to add more. The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, will create an estimated 212,400 jobs across Pennsylvania by 2032. And due to a recent executive order intended to tie strong labor standards to federal projects, many are likely to be union jobs.

On Labor Day morning, the air is brisk in downtown Erie, and groups of union members, sorted by their matching T-shirts, are huddled in the street, awaiting the start of the city’s annual Labor Day parade. Four lanes of trucks and buses manned by Teamsters and members of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) are poised to roll down State Street, the city of Erie’s main thoroughfare.

Bruce Johnson and James Schaffner, bus drivers with ATU, are among those waiting to march. As of early September, Johnson said he hadn’t noticed any outreach from his union, though he knows “Donald Trump isn’t really a union guy.”

Schaffner said he’s “proud to be a union member,” but he also said his union identity has nothing to do with his politics. “I’m a Democrat down from my head to my tippy toes,” he said, with a boyish smile, sporting a pair of sunglasses emblazoned with the Pittsburgh Penguins logo. Schaffner said their union is politically divided, and they simply “don’t bring up” politics — he doubts discussing the election would be productive.

Johnson, also a Democrat, nods next to him, saying he agrees “to the core.”

Though Sanders’ politics differ from Johnson’s and Schaffner’s, he shares that sentiment: He doesn’t think that his voter registration matters very much at all to the work that he does as a labor council president.

“Who I vote for doesn’t have anything to do with my love for [the CLC] and the work that we do” in the community, Sanders said.

He also loves his union. Being a union worker has changed his life, he explains, describing how he was a Las Vegas bartender for more than 20 years before he moved back to Erie County and followed his brother-in-law’s advice to take up sheet metal work.

Sanders was filling bags with union-made candy to throw to kids along the parade route when he excitedly told me he had finalized the purchase of a farm with his wife just the day before. And it’s largely thanks to his union job, he said, seeming almost shocked at his good fortune. “I am overly blessed to be with this union,” he said, adding that he can “really see what a union can do for workers” — a perspective he never had until he joined Local 12. Now, as CLC president, he wants others in the community to recognize the good that unions can do — and that they can be a real option for their kids when they graduate high school.

Sanders had expected to make up his mind about the election after the Sept. 10 presidential debate, but when we talked the next day, he told me he wasn’t impressed by either candidate’s performance. Trump, he said, seemed to become “unhinged” after Harris suggested that people leave his rallies early. “I didn’t like that.” However, he thought Harris “gave a better performance without answering any questions.”

“At this point,” Sanders said, “I’m probably gonna [decide how to] vote when I walk into the booth.”