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Democrats have struggled in parts of the Midwest. This union member may have the solution. [1]
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Date: 2022-10-17
As Democrats struggle to connect on the economy and continue hemorrhaging white working class voters, national party leaders might want to take a long look at a state legislative race in Missouri for inspiration down the stretch and headed into 2024. President Joe Biden has been the best president for organized labor since FDR, and if the party will just look at the polls and see where voters are trending, labor unions can be the key to a Democratic victory.
Adrian Plank doesn’t have the background of a typical politician because he never intended on becoming one. A union carpenter and former small business owner, whatever polish he has was honed by knocking doors around Boone and Randolph Counties, pitching his biography and candidacy to locals. And when he diagnoses the problems ailing his community and the nation at large, he lays the blame in no uncertain terms.
“If you're working and living paycheck to paycheck, there's not much you can do about politics, you just gotta keep plugging, and this is the reason why we don't get policies that help working folks, just rich men,” Plank tells Progress Report, laying out his front porch presentation and explaining his own political awakening. “I always tell people, poor people don't write the tax codes. The people with all the money who own our government, they write it.”
Running in a new iteration of a district that now leans slightly blue in a state that’s settling red, Plank is betting on that sort of working class economic populism to deliver a crucial election victory in a year roiled by inflation and point the way forward for Midwestern Democrats.
Plank’s political awakening and journey track the dissolution and radicalization of the American middle class. A carpenter by trade, Plank, now 49, spent a decade building a small business that installed granite surfaces — think showers and kitchens — in hotels across the country. The company continued to grow throughout the mid-aughts, taking him from his Central Missouri home to new construction sites nationwide and giving him little time to think about the broader economy or inner-workings of government policy.
Then a gang of Wall Street bankers blew up the global financial system with junk mortgages and complicated derivative swaps, which devastated everyone but was especially catastrophic for the construction industry. Most work dried up, and the jobs that did come would sometimes make collecting a paycheck next to impossible.
“I look back and at one point I paid myself eleven hundred bucks in two years,” Plank recalls. “It was all about keeping the employees paid. I would have a project that paid [the company] $80,000, but it took them a year and a half to pay it.”
Working for essentially free wasn’t sustainable, especially with a wife and small child at home, so Plank shut down the business. The decline left him feeling “lost,” he now admits, and two years spent selling cars in a weak economy provided no new direction. It was only when Plank found a job as a union carpenter, and subsequently became politically engaged, did the purpose and drive kick back in again.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/17/2129638/-As-Biden-helps-to-revive-unions-workers-are-helping-Dems-win-the-inflation-argument
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