by BEN SMITH
November 8, 2026
Many people I respect in the labor movement in North Carolina and beyond are in full celebration mode on account of the “blue tsunami” that took place in this past week’s election.
I understand the enthusiasm for the fact that the country has repudiated Trump and the brand of grotesque, racist, anti-worker, anti-immigrant politics that is at the heart of the Republican Party. The Republicans are clearly enemies, and it’s good that they’ve been vanquished for the time being.
But while the Republicans are bad, the Democratic Party is not our savior. The Democrats do not represent the interests of the working class. On the contrary, while the Democrats are occasionally more willing to allow unions to have a few “seats at the table” than their Republican counterparts, the party is on the whole dominated by capitalists and business interests.
This point was very clearly evident for many in the labor movement in the wake of the disastrous 2024 election — when the extreme unpopularity of the Biden Administration and the incompetent, brazenly corporate nature of the Harris campaign allowed Trump to win reelection despite his own historic unpopularity. But it still holds true today despite the exuberance and enthusiasm around last week’s election.
Some of the nature of the Democratic Party can be glimpsed by looking at the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina, where former Democratic governor Roy Cooper has defeated the noxious Trump-backed Republican candidate Michael Whatley.
The labor movement went all-in with supporting Roy Cooper. But Cooper is not some sort of champion of organized labor. He’s a pro-business centrist with very close, amenable connections to the state’s “business community.” He is the former governor of North Carolina, the state that has for many years been simultaneously ranked as the worst state in the country for workers and the No. 1 state for business.
The most telling example of where Cooper actually stands on unions and the rights of working people took place in the spring of 2024 during our monumental UAW at DTNA contract struggle.
When 7,000 members of the UAW were planning on going on strike at the four big DTNA plants in North Carolina that year, Roy Cooper refused to unequivocally back our struggle. Cooper did not want to be seen as being supportive of our fight because this would have compromised his standing with his primary constituency — the “business community.”
In so doing, Cooper (and Josh Stein) pissed off the International UAW leadership so much that the leadership saw to it that the New York Times published a story on the failure of North Carolina Democrats to support the UAW. The story — “Democrats Try to Navigate a Looming Strike in a Swing State” — was published on April 26, 2024, the day our contract was set to expire. Here’s how the article summarized the controversy:
“North Carolina has never been hospitable to organized labor, and the midnight strike at the North American subsidiary of the German industrial giant Daimler Truck has been greeted with trepidation by the state’s Democratic establishment, which has long tried to project a moderate, pro-business bent.
“But Shawn Fain, the U.A.W.’s brash new president, doesn’t much care.
“‘We don’t expect politicians to save the day, but at the end of the day, politicians have an obligation to the people that elect them,’ he said in an interview on Thursday, adding: ‘It’s our generation-defining moment. This is a time where politicians need to pick a side.’”
It was only after we settled our contract that Roy Cooper saw fit to express his enthusiasm for the “great win for hard working NC UAW members and their families” and indicate his appreciation for the “UAW and Daimler leadership staying at the negotiating table until a deal was done.” Clearly, Cooper and Josh Stein were happy that we didn’t end up going on strike. That would have created a “which side are you on” moment that could have exposed their lack of support for the working class and our unions.
In any event, my point is this: We need to be clear-eyed when dealing with the likes of Roy Cooper.
With this said, it’s undeniable that there are elements in the Democratic Party that are, on occasion, less spineless when it comes to the labor movement. This seems to include Richard Orjeda, the newly-elected congressman for the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina’s 9th district. The 9th district includes my plant, the Thomas Built Buses complex in High Point, which employs some 1,900 workers represented by the mighty UAW Local 5287.
It was hard to mistake the fact that Orjeda believes in maintaining a good relationship with organized labor. Orjeda showed up at more or less every single public event organized by the labor movement in this entire area for the past year. This is somewhat unprecedented for a national politician representing the High Point area.
We will see how Orjeda does in office. For all his willingness to show up for organized labor, Orjeda is a member of the Democratic Party, which means that he is in coalition with an organization that is, like the Republicans, the home of billionaires and much of the country’s ruling class. As the Wall Street Journal reported several days ago, there were many Democrats across the country that were elected on Tuesday that are former CEOs and business executives. As the Journal summarized, this includes, “Helena Buonanno Foulkes, a Costco board member and former retail CEO, who won her race to become the next governor of Rhode Island.” It also includes, “In Pennsylvania’s eighth district, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti—a Goldman Sachs alum with a Harvard M.B.A.” In New Jersey’s seventh congressional district, meanwhile, the newly-elected Democratic representative is a former healthcare executive by the name of Rebecca Bennett.
My opinion is that in order for organized labor to show the way forward for the working class, it’s important that we be honest with ourselves. The Democrats are not our party. For all the discussion of transforming the Democrats into some sort of “progressive” or pro-worker institution, the party is dominated by the likes of corporate hacks like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
My opinion is that the labor movement needs political independence. We need a labor party that’s independent from both the Republicans and Democrats. Building such a party is easier said than done — as was revealed by the experience of the militant labor leader Tony Mazzocchi and the campaign to build a U.S. Labor Party in the 1990s and early 2000s. But working-class political independence is the way forward, as I see it.
What we need above all else is a labor movement that isn’t afraid to fight the ruling class for a better world for working people.
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