The AFL-CIO

Well, it's official: the AFL-CIO got a divorce on its 50th anniversary. With it has fallen the greatest grassroots activism base of the Democratic party. The new blood - led mostly by Andy Stern of Service Employees International Union, who is joined by Jimmy Hoffa the Second of Teamsters - were unwilling to fork out the big bucks to pay for Democratic candidates who strangely keep failing to get elected. So they split off to focus on recruitment in order to rebuild their dwindled rank and file. The reasoning goes, when only 8% of workers in the country are union members, political clout cannot be expected.

Without making a call either way on unions - my opinion on that subject varies from case to case and decade to decade - I would like to point out that this represents the fracturing of a Democratic voter base while the Republican counterpart is burgeoning. The Republican counterpart to labor unions is, of course, conservative Protestant evangelicals who are interested in grassroots (hat tip for Ned Ryun, the man: http://www.generationjoshua.org). Last election cycle Christian homeschoolers alone mobilized unknown thousands in cities all across the U.S. Generation Joshua, the organization I worked for at the time, had a team of 85 homeschooled high school students who did a huge chunk of the grassroots work in the Columbus metropolitan area. This movement has quite clearly nowhere to go but up.

My conclusion is, the next election's grassroots landscape will see a marked shift in political power.