Big Labor Drops Big Dollars on Dems

12 of the 25 highest outside spenders on midterms are labor groups

Big Labor is dropping big money on the 2018 elections despite their own rhetoric about outside spending.

Unions represent 12 of the top 25 largest outside spending organizations in the 2018 midterm elections. Two of the three highest institutional outside spenders are labor groups, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The Carpenters and Joiners Union tops the list having spent $23.8 million on the midterm elections. Nearly all of that money has gone to aid Democratic congressional and Senate candidates, as conservatives benefited from only $612,500. Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA) is the third largest with $11.1 million spent—$10.3 million has gone to aid Democratic candidates.

Neither the Carpenters nor Laborers returned Washington Free Beacon requests for comment.

Blue-collar union members helped deliver Donald Trump to the White House despite the labor movement's near-universal embrace of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The disconnect between the voting habits of union members and that of leadership led some high profile labor leaders to reconsider ties between the Democratic Party and labor groups. Carpenters union president Doug McCarron and LIUNA president Terry O'Sullivan both met President Trump during his opening days at the White House and praised him for his agenda on trade and infrastructure.

Trump has made a point of courting private-sector unions, especially in the construction trades where he built his own company. He boasted about his longstanding ties to the industry at the2017 conference for North America's Building Trades Union—a collection of more than a dozen construction labor groups under the AFL-CIO umbrella. Despite his wooing, the Building Trades Union spent $42 million on the 2018 elections with $40 million going to aid Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Industrial unions spent $10,115,261 on the elections—only $2,745 has gone to conservative candidates or groups.

More