The New York Times is going to endorse Donald Trump as president. 

You probably do not believe that, nor should you, as a Times endorsement of Kamala Harris is pretty much a guarantee. That’s hardly an unfair assumption — the paper of record has not endorsed a Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 and has only endorsed GOP candidates six times since 1900. 

When the Times does get around to it, they will be joining over 1,000 others who have similarly voiced their support for Harris. The names on that list are a veritable who’s who of modern American life, such as current and former government officials, celebrities like Taylor Swift and Oprah Winfrey, and business moguls and the labor union leaders they are supposed to oppose. 

One notable exception stands out. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who announced last week that for the first time in 28 years, they will not endorse a candidate. This occurred after union leaders interviewed both candidates and polled their members. The results found that 60% of Teamsters supported Donald Trump. This divide between union management and the blue-collar workers that make up their front lines is worth examining, as Harris’ middle-class centric campaign is meant to target the latter.

Despite more than 100 union leaders, ranging from American Federation of Teachers to the National Treasury Employees Union, and just about everyone in between, cracks are starting to form with splinter groups of workers breaking away.

The United Auto Workers, who may be going on strike against Stellantis (makers of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, Ram) soon, has recently seen a group of workers go rogue and form the campaign group “Auto Workers for Trump,” The Wall Street Journal reports. New York and Staten Island’s Steamfitters Local 638 leader, went on to tell Fox News that their 10,000 members clocked-in 70% support for Trump. This is a problem for Harris.

The central message of the Harris campaign is her “new way forward” for the middle class. This is piggybacked by her economic plan, which she says is to create an “opportunity economy.” It is hard to say you understand the problems of Michigan assembly line workers while hanging out with Oprah Winfrey and currying the favor of Taylor Swift and over 200 Hollywood actors. 

It is true that this is a contradiction for pretty much every politician. Politics, by its very nature, is a popularity contest. But when the message — in this case an endorsement — is ubiquitous, it runs this risk of over-saturating the audience, causing it to receive it with a collective eye-roll.

This is especially a problem when it comes to media endorsements. To bring back the example from earlier, no one expects The New York Times or The Washington Post to endorse Trump — just like you would not expect Fox News to endorse Harris. So, why do they do it? A Gallup poll from 2023 on American trustworthiness in the media found that, for the first time in the poll’s history, the number of people with no trust in the media [38%] was higher than those with “great deal” [7%] and a “fair amount” [27%] combined. This is not good for Harris and is not good for the media.

For Harris to be successful, she needs to court the UAW members in Michigan and Illinois — not their bosses. She needs to be able to connect with New York’s steamfitters. She cannot rely on vibes and hype from voices that were never going to say anything to the contrary. Because if cracks form, or something like a labor strike happens before the election — which looks plausible — Americans are going to take notice and feel lied to. The endorsement wave would spill over. 

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