PPI President Will Marshall tells the National Journal‘s Eliza Newlin Carney that labor’s aggressive fight to unseat incumbent Democrats has been destructive and a losing strategy for Democrats to maintain a congressional majority:
The unions’ Arkansas challenge angered Democrats, from the White House on down. Some argue that the tens of millions of dollars that labor threw into the race was a waste, especially given that Arkansas is not union-friendly. Demanding loyalty to base voters, as tea party activists have set out to do in several GOP primaries, is a losing strategy for Democrats, said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
“Trying to enforce litmus tests and punish Democrats for ideological heresy [is] divisive and does not reflect the reality that Democrats are inevitably a coalition party,” Marshall said. He called the labor movement’s anti-Lincoln campaign “extraordinarily destructive.”
“The sad truth is that labor has not found a way to arrest its decline in the private economy,” Marshall added. “And this year, for the first time, we see more labor union members in the public sector than in the private sector.”