Vice President Joe Biden’s decision to not mount a challenge to Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid may pay her another benefit next week: the endorsement of the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union.
The union’s executive board will meet Tuesday to discuss its presidential endorsement. It is likely the board will officially back Clinton, according to a report, dashing the hopes of rival candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has lobbied hard for union support. The possibility that Biden might jump in had been holding the board back, but the vice president announced last month he would not run.
SEIU is a major player in Democratic politics. It is one of the largest unions in the country, representing everyone from service-sector workers to nurses and government employees. In the 2014 election cycle, it spent $23.6 million exclusively favoring Democratic candidates.
Clinton already has won the endorsements of several other major unions, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the National Education Association and the American Teachers Federation. The likely SEIU endorsement was reported by Politico.
Sanders has won the endorsements of some notable unions, such as National Nurses United, but none as large as the ones Clinton has reeled in. On Thursday, the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union announced it was backing Sanders.
The former secretary of state has had a rocky relationship with labor, which partly fueled Sanders’ rise in the polls. Clinton gave a private interview with the executive council of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, in June to discuss a presidential endorsement. She refused during the interview to declare a position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major proposed trade deal negotiated by the White House that labor leaders oppose. Clinton had been involved in the deal’s negotiations. Sanders was already on record opposing the deal. The AFL-CIO subsequently announced it was postponing any endorsement for the foreseeable future.
Clinton has worked hard to mend fences with labor leaders since then, coming out against the trade deal last month. She also has called for the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage to be raised to $12, though labor leaders favor an even higher rate of $15.
SEIU, which split from the AFL-CIO in 2005, was one of then Sen. Barack Obama’s earliest supporters in the 2008 election.
