Labor Makes Clinton's Case to Rust Belt Whites Curious About Trump

On a hot evening in early July, canvasser Todd Foose, a field director for the union-backed political group Working America, was on a porch in the Pittsburgh suburbs, talking to Cheryl Patalano about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. “I don’t like either of them,” Patalano, a 39-year-old librarian, said with a laugh. Foose explained that Working America is endorsing Clinton because of her proposals for the economy. “I know a lot of folks aren’t necessarily superexcited, but one of the things we know about her is that she does have some plans out there, and in the past, when we’ve been able to put good pressure on her from the grass roots, she does respond,” Foose said. “And that’s something we don’t really know for Trump—he doesn’t really seem to respond to anybody other than himself.” That seemed to strike a chord with Patalano.

As Democrats prepare for their national convention to start Monday in Philadelphia, Clinton is counting on one-on-one conversations like these to win over white, working-class Rust Belt voters in November—the voters who are most likely to abandon the Democratic Party for Trump. Founded in 2003, Working America is an AFL-CIO affiliate group for workers who have no union. Today it claims 3 million members, more than any single AFL-CIO union. In 2013 the group’s staff had face-to-face conversations with 46,000 Boston voters, helping former union official Marty Walsh narrowly win his mayoral race. “More and more people are cluttering the airwaves with ads, especially with all the super-PACs,” says Jeremy Bird, a Clinton consultant who served as national field director for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. “The face-to-face, older-school method is actually a place where you can differentiate yourself from the other candidates.”