Right to Work Protest.JPG

Thousands protested Right to Work before it was passed last year, but unions and Democrats have been very quiet since then.

(J. Scott Park | Mlive.com)

The Democrats got their butts kicked on Right to Work (RTW) last year.

It's true that once Gov. Rick Snyder and his Republican allies decided to ram the legislation through without hearings or public debate, there was no stopping it.

But the Democrats had options after Snyder signed the measure allowing workers to get the benefits of working under a union contract without paying dues.

They could have launched a ballot initiative to stop it. They could have tried to recall those who voted for it, although Republicans did change laws making it harder to do so. Their leaders could have refused to negotiate with the GOP on anything.

And they could have gone all Saul Alinsky and gotten in Republicans' faces in their districts -- organizing protests and haranguing politicians when they were just picking up tomatoes at the grocery store.

Instead, they filed a couple long-shot lawsuits and essentially decided to give up.

Fearful that membership would plummet, as it has in Wisconsin after anti-labor legislation was enacted, many unions' leadership battened down the hatches. They wanted to preserve jobs within the current union hierarchy instead of launching a counter-attack or trying to organize new workers.

Some notable exceptions include the Michigan Education Association (MEA), which has concentrated on membership retention and only lost 1 percent so far.

And the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has led the charge on hiking fast food workers' wages. If they can crack the code of organizing the service sector, there's hope for unions, after all.

Meanwhile, Democrats in the Legislature backed off, as well. Despite warnings that Dems wouldn't work with Republicans on anything (Rep. Doug Geiss (D-Taylor) unhelpfully declared, "There will be blood"), leaders tried to turn the page at the beginning of this session.

They even were willing to work with Snyder on his road-funding scheme, which would inevitably mean raising taxes -- a political disaster for Democrats. However, as Inside Michigan Politics reported Friday, that idea looks dead (again).

Why did Dems cave? For one thing, they got spooked by polling. Snyder took a hit in publicly released polls because of RTW, but Dems didn't capitalize on that fact. Instead, they decided that RTW wasn't a winning issue because of internal polling showing the public was split on it.

Rather than make the case and fight on RTW -- perhaps tying it to the very popular proposal to raise the minimum wage to boost its appeal -- Dems surrendered.

Republicans don't do that. Take Obamacare. Republicans have pushed back against popular ideas like expanding coverage to 30 million Americans and requiring insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions. Instead, they framed the issue as big government barreling in to make all your health care decisions.

And they've been very effective.

But that's an essential difference between the parties. No matter how unpopular their policies might be -- like fighting against contraception coverage when 90 percent of Americans support birth control -- the GOP will commit to it.

Democrats will fold on essential parts of their party platform if the polling looks bad or the fight seems too rough.

And that's a key reason why their party loses. Americans like fighters. They may not like all GOP ideas, but they know their candidates believe in something and will go to the wall for it.

Democrats will argue that they're committed to being the party of the middle class. Well, unions built the modern middle class, and thanks to RTW, they're under furious assault.

That would seem to be all the more reason to keep up the RTW fight.

Susan J. Demas is Publisher and Editor of Inside Michigan Politics, a nationally acclaimed, biweekly political newsletter. She can be reached at susan@sjdemas.com. Follow her on Twitter here.