As the former union bastions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin flipped from blue to red on election night, with votes rolling in for a billionaire real-estate mogul with a cheap populist varnish, the once-mighty American labor movement saw its life flash before its eyes.
Early in the Democratic primary, virtually every labor union lined up behind Hillary Clinton—seeing her as a better political bet than the socialist insurgent Bernie Sanders. In the general election, they spent record amounts of money on their ground-game operations to turn out the vote for Clinton and give Democrats a majority in the Senate.
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