Month: November 2025

2025 Special Elections Offer Encouragement For American Workers and Their Advocates

Posted on by Stand Up for Workers Action

Riding a wave of resistance to the hard-right policies of Donald Trump’s Administration, Democratic candidates won decisively in every special election across the U.S. on November 4th.

Most notably, the election victories include:

  • the first woman to become governor of Virginia
  • a second woman governor candidate in New Jersey
  • a democratic socialist as mayor of New York City
  • California voters resoundingly endorsed a plan to counter mid-census gerrymandering in Texas by carrying out their own counter-gerrymandering
  • Democrats flipped two Public Service Commission seats in Georgia

And, three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices were solidly retained in office despite a last-minute personal push by Trump to unseat them, bolstered by reportedly massive fundraising.

The Tuesday results exceeded predictions from pre-election polls in those states.  Before Tuesday’s election, an array of high-quality nationwide polling showed a distinct pattern of voter preference for policies and positions advanced by the Democratic party.  That included a well-respected poll which showed unaligned respondents indicating they are “leaning” Democratic by nearly a 10% margin.

Let’s talk numbers.

  • In traditionally blue New Jersey’s gubernatorial election, Democratic candidate Rep. and ex-Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli by a solid 9% margin, or 414,000 votes.  Arguably more significantly, in more purple Virginia, former Congresswoman and ex-CIA case analyst Abigail Spanberger garnered a nearly 15% margin of victory, carrying the state by more than 490,000 votes.
  • Also significant, Californians overwhelmingly adopted Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to counter Trump’s five-congressional-seat Texas gerrymandering scheme by 63% to 36%.  And the three Democratic justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court who were up for “retention” (unopposed) won by a margin of 61% to 36%, despite a last-minute surprise personal effort by Trump to turn out his supporters to remove them.
  • In the traditionally blue city of New York, candidate Zohran Mamdani defeated two other contenders, winning by 50% (to 41% for his closest competitor, Andrew Cuomo) of the ballots cast.

Analysts looking at the results opined that they represent an even greater shift away from the party in power than typically occurs in mid-term elections, and may signal a more fundamental shift in voter preferences, driven largely by sharply rising living costs.  Every single county in New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Georgia moved toward Democrats.  The leading issues for voters for Sherrill and Spanberger were health care and the economy, and they won 93% of those economy-motivated voters.  Zohran Mamdani’s winning campaign in New York City was laser focused on affordability.

Elections in a few places outside the media spotlight also showed trending more towards Democrats, as reported by the newsletter Popular Information.  In a Georgia state-wide election, Democrats for the first time won seats on the state’s Public Service Commission.  In Pennsylvania’s largest “swing” county, Bucks, voters ousted the county’s Republican sheriff, who had signed a formal agreement that his department would collaborate with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement programs and personnel.  In Mississippi, Democrat successes ended a thirteen-year Republican supermajority in the state Senate.  And in the third-largest school district inTexas, Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, progressive candidates won all three open board seats, giving them a 4-3 majority.  The prior Republican dominated board had removed books and chapters on climate change, vaccines, COVID-19 and diversity, and fired half of the district’s librarians.

These results reflected closely an array of polling numbers that shows that voter sentiment expressed in the November 4 vote is not limited to the states holding those elections, but is broadly shared by voters across the nation. An approval survey from late October, based on numbers from the aggregation site fiftyplusone.news, shows a continuing decline in approval for Trump since his inauguration. At that time his approval rating was 50% with a 40% disapproval rating; while current survey showed  disapproval by 55.3% compared to approval by 40.8%, a remarkable 14% decline in only nine months.  As our political analyst, Ian Silverii, pointed out, these numbers represent a weighted average of a variety of polls, which strengthens their credibility.  The disapproval level is also the largest yet for the president, even including the time during his first term when he was criticized for one million deaths of Americans due to COVID-19.

Mr. Silverii also reported on a high quality generic political poll showing Democrats ahead of Republicans by 3% percentage points.  He noted this poll is well regarded for predicting a party’s chances before an upcoming election.  Tuesday’s results, according to one analyst, predicts that Democrats will have an 8% generic advantage in 2026.

Mr. Silverii also pointed to a “leaned party ID” poll, which reports percentages of party identifiers and “leaners,” which showed that, for Quarter 3 of 2025, respondents leaning towards the Democratic Party outnumbered those inclined towards the Republican Party by 48% to 41% percent.  Those seeking further information about current voter inclinations might check CNN’s data guru, Harry Enten, who explains why the “leaning” poll matters.

In all, both the election results and his synthesis of nationwide polling data offer a solid basis for hope for supporters of American workers. With this encouragement, it appears clear that continuing, and greater, support for workers, through entities like the Stand Up for Workers PAC, have a better chance of success than many supporters have been anticipating. We look forward to working alongside advocates like you to ensure protections for workers continue to advance.

 

Written By Paul Merry, Stand Up For Workers Board Member

The 20% of U.S. Companies Scrapping DEI Efforts Report Worse Morale, Innovation and Recruitment

Posted on by Stand Up for Workers Action

Nearly 20% of U.S. businesses have cancelled efforts to improve diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) among their workforce since the latest presidential election, according to a recent report by Resume.org. In addition to this, approximately 1/5 of the 965 executives polled in the survey found their employee morale, performance and recruitment have suffered.

Other outcomes highlighted in the survey include a decline and deprioritization in the hiring of under-represented employees, a reduction in innovation by staff, and about 1/3 of companies reported difficulty in attracting and retaining such workers. Unsurprisingly, companies who dropped their DEI programs have also reported an increase in incidents of discrimination and bias in their workplace.

“Companies that abandon DEI risk reputational harm, disengagement, and an inability to adapt to an increasingly global, values-driven marketplace,” said Kara Dennison, head of career advising at Resume.org. “Elimination of these programs can hurt a company’s culture, cause job performance to suffer, and lead employees to feel less psychologically safe.”

DEI work involves developing policies and practices that assure the absence of barriers to the full participation of under-represented groups in an organization’s activities, including business and service delivery by government and private industry.

Some of America’s largest corporations, including Amazon, Google, McDonald’s, Target, Verizon and Walmart, have announced the elimination of their DEI programs in response to pressure from supporters of the current U.S. administration. However, they don’t count for the majority. Many well-known corporations such as Apple and Costco remain part of the 80% of U.S. companies committed to DEI and investing in inclusive work environments.

Following the DEI boom of 2020, employment in jobs related to DEI efforts have reportedly dipped in 2025. 17,700 people remain employed in such positions, compared to 20,048 positions in 2023, a high point of DEI employment.

“DEI” is a label that has been applied to a range of efforts by both private business organizations and governmental units to examine and address potential forms of bigotry and discrimination, such as race, religious and disability bias, in workplaces and other spaces where they operate. While similar efforts existed pre-2020, this initiative became nationally demanded in response to a long series of incidents of Black Americans being killed at the hands of police and private (White) citizens under circumstances which threw doubt on the need for the use of the force applied. The most notable trigger was the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black resident of Minneapolis, who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes. The officer responsible was subsequently convicted of murder. Floyd’s death and the reaction that followed was yet another reminder of the structural racism, bias and oppression that continue to plague our country and show up in our workplaces.

The United States of America was born in an era of great disparities among people. Although male English citizens at that time were able to vote for members of Parliament, colonists in New England and other parts of North America had no say in their government under the king of England. Women and other groups were also denied opportunities for work and voting because of their status.

Despite the inclusion of language supporting equal rights in our country’s foundational documents, and despite a years-long, bloody civil war in defense of those rights for enslaved people, segments of the U.S. population have continued to resist and protest efforts to uphold them for all Americans. Years of protests and demonstrations supporting rights and the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s reflected further attempts to achieve this goal, in the face of lynchings and other abuses of minorities. The appearance of DEI efforts in all parts of the country in the wake of the George Floyd murder represents another, arguably more broad-based, effort towards that goal.

The present White House administration’s executive order to eliminate DEI programs within the federal government and by public pressure against private organizations is part of a plan to deny and suppress the facts concerning America’s history of racially disparate treatment. This includes the support and condoning of slavery and how it affected those enslaved under it, and other historical information which the administration finds unpalatable. However, feedback from companies that have cancelled DEI efforts seems clear: the elimination of DEI does nothing to improve working conditions for workers, much less for our country as a whole.

Commitments by businesses hoping to fulfill the ideals that have made America great are the surest way to greater worker satisfaction and company success. Companies should stand strong against political efforts to eliminate DEI programs. Their future might depend on it.

 

Written By Paul H. Merry, Stand Up For Workers Board Member

Candidate Spotlight: Roy Cooper

Posted on by Stand Up for Workers Action

It was March 29, 2016, less than one week after North Carolina’s then-governor, Pat McCrory, had signed HB 2 into law. That bill required transgender students and adults in public buildings to use restrooms corresponding to the gender assigned to them at birth. As North Carolina’s attorney general for eight years, Roy Cooper had defended dozens of other laws in the courts. But not this time.

Roy Cooper announced that he and his staff would not defend HB 2 because it was blatantly unconstitutional. That November, Cooper campaigned against Gov. McCrory and became governor of North Carolina. A little more than one year later, he signed a bill that repealed HB 2, even though that compromise bill fell short of a full repeal of the anti-LGBTQ restrictions contained in the 2016 legislation.

Roy Cooper served eight years as governor, retiring in 2024 because of the term limits on that position. As governor, he created hundreds of thousands of jobs for North Carolinians.  He got a bipartisan agreement to expand Medicaid in that state, and he enacted a plan to incentivize hospitals to relieve more than $4 billion of existing medical debt. He focused on improving public education, tackling the opioid crisis, revitalizing rural communities, and ensuring that North Carolinians have the training they need for higher-skill jobs.

Cooper has won every election in which he has run, as a state legislator, attorney general and governor. Now, he has announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in November 2026. If elected, he would replace Republican Thom Tillis and could help to flip control of the Senate to Democrats. That would ensure that the Senate would not confirm judges and U.S. Supreme Court justices nominated by President Trump.

Roy Cooper is currently leading in the polls against his probable opponent, Republican Michael Whatley. Cooper has begun running campaign advertisements that make a populist appeal: “The biggest corporations and the richest Americans have grabbed unimaginable wealth at your expense.”  This will be a hotly contested election.

The Stand Up for Workers PAC will likely endorse Gov. Cooper in his election campaign, as part of our efforts to regain control of both houses of Congress in 2026. If Democrats regain control of the Senate, we can block Trump’s efforts to put more loyalists on the federal bench, including on the Supreme Court. This race is central to our efforts to stop Trump’s war on American workers.

 

Written By Barry Roseman, Stand Up For Workers Board Member & Treasurer

“It’s The Economy, Stupid!”

Posted on by Stand Up for Workers Action

“It’s the economy, stupid,” said James Carville in 1992 when describing Bill Clinton’s winning economic message.

In 2024, Donald Trump was able to convince a small majority of Americans that he had a winning economic appeal, despite the Biden administration’s four-year recovery from the depths of the COVID-induced economic downturn in 2020 and 2021.  What was Trump’s economic appeal, how did it shape the election, and how he has delivered in the last ten months?

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign that his economic plans would lead to growth in the economy, while Kamala Harris’s economic message was based more on decreasing income inequality among the lowest-paid segments in this country.  The historic inflation rate was a major factor in the 2024 election – the price increases that had occurred in 2021 and 2022, even though price inflation in 2023 and 2024 was more moderate.  Many voters preferred Trump because he was a businessman who supposedly understood how to make the economy grow.

Trump’s economic program fell into five categories:

  1. reducing inflation
  2. including reducing the prices of groceries
  3. making the 2017 tax cuts permanent
  4. providing tax relief to the middle class
  5. increasing tariffs to increase manufacturing jobs in the United States

By nearly a two-to-one margin, voters said in exit polls that the economy was worse than it had been four years earlier.  One in four voters, including 41% of Black voters and 43% of Latino voters, said the economy was the primary reason for their vote.  And Harris received 7.1 million fewer votes in 2020 than Biden received in 2020, particularly in major urban counties.

The economy is now failing for ordinary hard-working citizens.  The percentage of long-term job seekers is now 26% of the total number of unemployed workers.  Delinquency rates for automobile loans are at a 15-year high.  The delinquency rates for office loans are at a rate approaching the peak in 2008, just before the Great Recession.  The most recent official inflation rate was at 3.0%, close to the annual high.  Many analysts expect that tariff rates will result in further increases in inflation, as exporters and importers reach a limit in the amount of price increases they can absorb.

The opposite is true for the upper reaches of the economy.  The stock market is at close to a record high.  Sales of luxury goods – principally eyewear, fashion, leather goods, watches and jewelry – in this country will increase by 3.6% this year.  The sales of luxury homes increased by 15.2% compared to one year ago.

This is already affecting Trump’s approval numbers.  According to realclearpolitics.com, a conservative-leaning website, Trump is now 13.4% under water in voter appraisals of his economic performance, and 25.3% under water concerning inflation.  Those polls show that 61.0% of voters disapprove and only 35.7% approve of his handling of inflation.  That trend is persistent over time and has gotten worse in recent months, with some recent polls showing 36% and even 42% disapproval numbers about inflation.

These economic and poll trends do not include voter disapproval of Trump’s anti-worker initiatives, from his attempts to reverse trends in decreasing inequality under the rubric of anti-DEI initiatives, to his efforts to deport millions of immigrants, to his efforts to roll back Department of Labor regulations, to his attacks on the federal workforce.

The mid-term elections are one year away.  If Trump’s economic- and inflation-based approval ratings continue to decline, Democrats could regain control of the U.S. House and possibly the Senate – if they have a positive message for America’s workers.  Democrats cannot just assume that an anti-Trump message will be enough.

Whether their critique is the one made by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in “Abundance,” or some other approach, Democrats need to overcome voters’ overall belief that Republicans are better than Democrats in growing the economy or in combatting income and wealth inequality.  Otherwise, Democratic voters will stay home in 2026, just as they did in 2024, and Trump will win by default.

 

Written By Barry Roseman, Stand Up For Workers Board Member

Candidate Highlight: Aftyn Behn

Posted on by Stand Up for Workers Action

Why is Aftyn Behn running for Congress? “I’m a pissed-off social worker in the South,” Tenn. State Representative Behn explained to CNN’s Audie Cornish.  “I think for me, it’s a moment where people are angry, I’m angry.  I’m upset that my constituents are losing their benefits.  I’m upset that people are struggling to afford the basic cost of living.” 

Representative Mark Green, who used to represent Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District, announced his retirement in late July.  The special election for that vacancy will be held on December 2, 2025.

Aftyn Behn is the Democratic nominee in that district.  She is a former social worker and healthcare organizer for the Tennessee Justice Center, as well as the lead organizer for Enough Is Enough TN, which advocated for removing a state representative who had sexually abused young girls, and a district organizer for Indivisible.

Behn was elected to the state legislature in 2023, with the endorsement of the Tennessee AFL-CIO.  She sponsored bipartisan legislation to reform the way that the state legislature handles workplace harassment and discrimination complaints, and she proposed abolishing the Tennessee sales tax on groceries.

Behn framed her primary campaign in terms of economic populism.  “The culture wars are a distraction from the real issue, which are economic issues.”  She added, “Cheaper groceries, affording rent, these are issues that really resonate with young folks. And I think if the Democratic Party can become a party of the economy, of economic populism, then they can rein in both independents and young people.”  

Behn won the Democratic primary for that seat in a four-way race.  Her general election opponent is Matt Van Epps, who has been endorsed by Trump.

State legislators decided in 2020 to “crack” Nashville’s former congressional district into three majority-Republican districts, since a majority of Nashville residents vote for Democrats.  TN-07, created because of that gerrymander, includes some heavily Democratic parts of Nashville, some affluent suburbs and exurbs, the city of Clarksville, and rural areas between the Kentucky and Alabama state lines.

If this were a normal political year, it would be difficult for any Democrat to win TN-07.  Trump won the district by 22 points in 2024.  Green won by 20 points that year.

But this is not a normal year.  Democrats overperformed their opponents in two special elections in Florida by 15 points this April.  Behn’s populist message, the impact of Trump’s economic bill on rural health care, and a failing economy for middle-income Americans mean that she has a realistic chance of winning.

In her acceptance speech, Behn said, “We are hungry for something real. We are tired of watching billionaires hoard power while families can’t afford groceries.  We’re tired of potholes, hospital closures, and politicians who cash checks instead of keeping promises. Tonight, Tennessee sent a message, and that message is: women can still fight, organizers can still win, and Democrats in the Deep South aren’t done yet.”

The Stand Up for Workers PAC has endorsed her candidacy in addition to the Tennessee AFL-CIO.  Her populist message will appeal to all voters in TN-07.  That is particularly true given the economic pain that Trump and congressional Republicans have imposed on the working class and rural Americans.  If Behn can win in heavily Republican counties in middle Tennessee, Democrats will be able to compete in almost every congressional district in 2026.

 

Written By Barry Roseman, Stand Up For Workers Board Member

Elections: Looking Ahead and Voting For Change

Posted on by Stand Up for Workers Action

With key races being won, we’re reminded that every ballot cast shapes the future of our rights.

For workers, the policies that protect fair wages, safe workplaces, and equal opportunity are decided at every level of government, from city council to Congress, making all elections over the next year critical.

This election season is about more than 2026. It’s about building the foundation for lasting change in 2028 and beyond. Staying informed, speaking up, and showing up to vote are some of the most basic and powerful ways we can safeguard our rights and demand a fairer, more just workplace and society for all. As we head into the holiday season, we encourage you to continue having conversations, bringing awareness, and showing up for our neighbors who continue to be heavily impacted by the current U.S. administration.

Looking ahead, we are still building momentum and identifying candidates that will make the highest impact on U.S. workers and their families. Have a candidate in your area that we should know about? Send an email to [email protected].