Union Jack
 | |
| Era | The Modern Era |
|---|---|
| Age | 35-50 |
| Home | Scranton, PA |
| Demographic | white, union tradesman, culturally conservative |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
| Predecessor | Chattanooga Travis |
Jack is a union electrician in north-eastern Pennsylvania who kept his union membership but shifted his vote to Trump. He represents the working-class swing voter whose support often decides presidential elections in the Rust Belt states.
Who they stand for
Jack represents white union tradesmen of the industrial North, including electricians, pipefitters and operating engineers, whose households once gave Democrats their vote margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin but no longer reliably do so. Luzerne County, next to Scranton, voted for Barack Obama twice and then voted for Trump by a wide margin, and the same pattern repeated across the region. The Marcellus Shale gas formation gave the building trades a decade of steady work, so Jack interprets a promise to restrict fracking as a promise to reduce his working hours. In the 2024 election, the Teamsters union made no presidential endorsement, and the union's president spoke at the Republican National Convention.
Chattanooga Travis, an earlier persona in this series, voted Republican over abortion and same-sex marriage and ignored his own union's endorsement of Democratic candidates. Jack does not attend church and has no objection to same-sex marriage; his vote instead turns on trade policy, immigration, and his belief that the cultural left looks down on people who work with their hands. Travis at least ignored his union's endorsement; Jack does not read it in the first place.
Playing to them
Jack judges a president mainly by whether steady work keeps coming to people in his trades. Tariffs, rules requiring domestically made content, and pipeline approvals are his main tests, and a trade deal that causes a plant to close or an EPA rule that idles a drilling rig fails all of those tests at once. He is not lost over abortion or gay marriage, which he treats as other people's business, but he is lost immediately by anything that seems to show contempt for people who work with their hands, such as student-loan forgiveness paid for by his taxes or a cabinet with no one who has done manual labour. A Democratic candidate can compete for his vote by treating the building trades as central to the party rather than as a problem.
A president who wins Jack's support through tariffs loses the support of Country Club Craig and Phoenix Pablo, and the hard-line border rhetoric that keeps Jack's support loses the support of Valley Rosa and College Chloe. Rust Belt Rick and Detroit Denise tend to move with Jack on trade policy, though Denise leaves the moment a president repeats his position on immigration.
Where they live
The five states where Union Jack makes up the largest share of the electorate in the modern era:
- West Virginia
- Pennsylvania
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Wisconsin
Lineage
Bay Ridge Kevin → Chattanooga Travis → Union Jack
Union members who vote conservative, and what changes is how far the union vote and the conservative vote have separated. Kevin votes issue by issue and still votes Democrat on pay and pensions. Travis keeps the union card for the pension and votes Republican on guns, abortion and marriage, ignoring the union's endorsement. Jack keeps the card and votes Trump on trade, immigration and woke politics. Religion decided Travis's vote and plays no part in Jack's, because marriage was lost, abortion went to the Court, and the cultural issues of 2019 are ones Jack cares about without going to church. The union endorsement goes from binding, to ignored, to irrelevant.