President Joe Biden met on Tuesday with leaders from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as he tries to court the crucial union vote ahead of November.
Biden is competing with former President Donald Trump for a Teamsters endorsement. With more than 1 million members, the union is one of the largest in the world and has a large presence in several battleground states.
Trump met with the Teamsters earlier this year. The group twice endorsed against Trump, backing Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, but has not made an announcement for 2024. The union was not expected to deliver an immediate endorsement on Tuesday.
Trump has made appealing to union members, a traditionally Democratic voting bloc, a key part of his strategy for winning over working-class voters, especially in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – all three of which broke for Biden in the 2020 election after backing Trump four years earlier.
Biden has already received one critical union endorsement: the United Auto Workers backed him during their Washington meeting in January.
UAW President Shawn Fain said Biden had earned the group’s endorsement, noting he was the first sitting president to stand alongside union members on a picket line during a strike in Michigan last year.
“Joe Biden bet on the American worker while Donald Trump blamed the American workers,” Fain said in January. “We need to know who’s going to sit in the most powerful seat in the world and help us win as a united working class. So if our endorsement must be earned, Joe Biden has earned it.”
Fain was in the audience for Biden’s State of the Union address last Thursday.
Biden has long presented himself as “the most pro-union president…
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