The AFL-CIO has made no secret of its hope to reverse 2010 elections. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO AFL-CIO aims at GOP governors

The nation’s most prominent labor organization plans to throw its political weight most heavily into a half-dozen governors’ races in the 2014 cycle, focusing on states where the outcome of gubernatorial elections will be most “consequential” for union members and working-class voters, the AFL-CIO’s top strategist said Tuesday.

Meeting with a small group of reporters, AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer said that the unrelenting state of gridlock in Washington means that state elections will likely have a greater impact on real people’s lives than federal elections.


He named six Republican governors at the top of the AFL-CIO target list: Rick Scott of Florida, Rick Snyder of Michigan, Paul LePage of Maine, John Kasich of Ohio, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania.

“While a lot of the attention here in the Beltway has been around who’s going to control the Senate or what’s going to happen in the House, for most Americans, what’s really important in 2014 is going to be what happens to the governors who have pursued scorched-earth policies in their states,” Podhorzer said. “That’s the arena that we’re focused on. That’s the area that’s going to be most consequential for people’s lives.”

The veteran labor strategist, who helped lead the Democratic coalition to tactical dominance in the areas of data and analytics over the past decade, said the political class should not assume the 2014 electorate will mirror the population that voted in the Republican wave year of 2010.

It is true, Podhorzer said, that midterm electorates tend to be whiter and less diverse than presidential-year electorates. But he said the AFL-CIO had studied the results of both the 2006 and 2010 elections and concluded that the broad-stroke demographics of turnout would be less significant than the specific, individual voters who show up on Election Day.

Looking at those two midterm election years, Podhorzer said: “Almost all of the major demographic categories are identical, but there’s incredible activity happening inside those demographics.”

“What our strategy is, is making sure that the working people who turned out in 2006 — the working people who were demobilized for the 2010 elections — are turning out,” he said, adding later: “If we’re successful, there will be a big battle for the white middle- and working-class vote.”

Rather than anticipating another wave election, Podhorzer said strategists and political reporters should anticipate an election that’s “more like trench warfare.”

Major labor organizations, including the AFL-CIO, have battled Republican governors in the states ever since the 2010 election swept a huge number of them into office. The AFL-CIO has made no secret of its hope to reverse that result, telling POLITICO last December that gubernatorial elections in the Midwest would be a major focus for the 2014 cycle.

But Podhorzer’s comments this week are the most emphatic statement to date of the organization’s priorities during the midterm election, and of the thinking that has led one of the most significant groups in the center-left coalition to turn its attention outside of Washington. He did not offer any spending details, but said that the unions’ main support would be from “people power” as opposed to big, expensive, transient TV buys.

Republican Governors Association spokesman Jon Thompson called the AFL-CIO’s battle plan a “desperate attempt to counter the pro-jobs, pro-business reforms” of the large class of GOP state executives.

“While unions bicker and fight for their very survival, Republican Governors are getting results — and the voters have taken notice,” Thompson said in an email.

The six governors Podhorzer named Tuesday represent some of the GOP’s most prominent opponents of organized labor: Walker made a national name for himself by ending collective bargaining for Wisconsin public employees and Snyder signed a “right-to-work” measure late last year, while Kasich passed a restrictive labor reform law that was subsequently overturned in a referendum fight.

Podhorzer said he expected the toxic state of the GOP brand would drag down all those governors to some extent, if not necessarily to the same degree as it hurts Republicans on the federal level.

“Scott Walker is somewhat unique, in that there’s been so much activity in Wisconsin over the last three years, that I think the people there think of him as Scott Walker, more than ‘nationally branded Republican,’” he said. “I think with the federal races and with the lesser-known governors, that the Republican brand still attaches to them.”

The senior labor official cautioned that federal politics are still important to the AFL-CIO – “We’ll be mounting campaigns in all of these places” – but said that the stakes in state elections, and the distribution of AFL-CIO resources, made the gubernatorial campaigns more natural targets.

“The nature of the labor movement is that most of our resources are fixed. It’s where the members live,” Podhorzer said.

He expressed confidence that the Senate would stay in Democratic hands, but acknowledged that the heavily Southern tilt in the 2014 Senate map was an impediment for labor.

“We have less influence in some of those red states than in the others, but we’ll be committed to progressives that are in those [states] that will keep the Democratic majority,” Podhorzer said.

In some states, the 2014 landscape is still taking shape, he added, noting that recruitment setbacks had complicated life for Democrats in a handful of battlegrounds.

“In the Senate, it would be a different situation if [Democratic former Montana Gov. Brian] Schweitzer had decided to run. If there were a candidate against Walker, that would be a different race. That makes that race more difficult to win than the other races that I mentioned,” he said. “But that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.”