In early 2020, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the country’s second-largest union, announced that it would spend $150 million on the election, most of it focused on getting infrequent Black and Hispanic voters in swing states to cast ballots. This made a kind of intuitive sense when you consider the SEIU’s demographics. Among its nearly 2 million members are many janitors, healthcare workers, and other low-wage workers, and the union’s Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign targets fast food employees—the people the SEIU is organizing and fighting for, in other words, are likely to be part of the same communities where the SEIU led get-out-the-vote efforts. These were also the voters who helped President-elect Joe Biden edge out President Donald Trump—in 2016, Hillary Clinton only beat the Republican among union households by eight points, according to exit polls, but Biden doubled that margin.
For years, SEIU has been gradually expanding its political spending. In 2004, its PAC spent just $12.5 million on federal races, according to OpenSecrets. In the 2008 cycle, that number ramped up to over $47 million as the SEIU went into debt to help elect Barack Obama, and in 2016, the union spent some $70 million in an effort to boost turnout in communities of color.
The SEIU has been targeting people of color in its outreach for years—it slammed Republicans on immigration in the 2016 cycle, for instance—and it continued that trend in 2020, as its PAC produced a wide variety of campaign ads in English and Spanish that often singled out Biden’s ties to Obama. SEIU-made ads also emphasized President Donald Trump’s failure to provide personal protective equipment for frontline workers, a particular focus of SEIU President Mary Kay Henry. The SEIU's PAC spent $11 million on these web ads, according to OpenSecrets, which represented the bulk of its spending this cycle.
The SEIU also contributed major amounts to other progressive PACs: $6.5 million to United We Can, $3.5 million to Strategic Victory Super Fund PAC, $3 million to For Our Future (a PAC that pooled donations from across the labor movement), and $2 million to Win Justice PAC.
The upshot is that the SEIU’s spending was aimed at battleground states, and in particular, on activating as many nonvoters as possible. This effort wasn’t limited to PAC-to-PAC or ad spending, either, with the SEIU mobilizing volunteers for door-knocking, phone calls and texts. 32BJ SEIU, a branch of the larger union that includes 175,000 cleaners, maintenance workers and others in the Northeast, made over 1.1 million calls to Pennsylvania alone. That's the kind of GOTV power a union can wield.
What does the union get for its spending? At this point, the SEIU doesn’t have to work very hard to get the Democrats to back its preferred policies. The union has been working hand-in-glove with the party for a long time now, and their preferences are largely in sync. But the SEIU has no doubt helped push Biden to adopt more progressive positions, including setting a $15 federal minimum wage and providing PPE to workers in many industries. It remains to be seen whether Biden will live up to his end now that the SEIU has helped elect him.
