California firefighters consider bucking national union on Harris

SACRAMENTO, California — California Democratic leaders have given the state's firefighters seven military transport planes , better working hours and expanded ranks. Yet the firefighters are having as much trouble as many other union members in deciding who to back for president.

California's main firefighters union is still making up its mind after the International Association of Fire Fighters decided last week not to endorse a presidential candidate, despite being the first union to endorse Joe Biden in 2019.

California Professional Firefighters, as the state chapter of IAFF is known, are likely to go the way of the West Coast Teamsters, who broke last month with their national chapter in endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. That's partly due to former President Donald Trump's recent alienation of first responders by threatening to hold California's emergency disaster funds hostage.

“He would rather watch our state burn in the name of his political games than to send help if he were to become president again,” CPF President Brian Rice said at the time.

Amid a national union identity crisis, California firefighters' endorsement could theoretically help sway undecided voters in swing states, especially Western states that look to California as a firefighting model. Firefighters unions are the most popular in the country, according to an August YouGov poll .

"There is no question from all the opinion research I've ever seen that one of the most valuable enforcements a candidate can get is a firefighter's endorsement, and the reason is because everyone loves and respects firefighters," said Darry Sragow, a longtime California campaign consultant.

But the deliberations are exposing a persistent — and widening — gulf between labor unions' leadership and their rank-and-file members. While leadership trends Democratic because of the party’s history of pro-union policies, members have been trending Republican for decades, in line with other demographic markers like gender and socioeconomic status.

Joe Kerr, a retired Orange County fire captain and union leader now running an uphill battle as a Democrat to unseat GOP Rep. Young Kim from Congress, said he saw the split emerge at least twenty years ago.

“When I was a firefighter, I was a Republican man,” Kerr said. “When I became the union president for Orange County firefighters and a vice president for California Professional Firefighters, I switched to the Democratic Party because it was very clear there was one party trying to protect our rights and our jobs, and there was one party trying to take them away.”

IAFF General President Edward Kelly said last week that the national board’s vote not to endorse was a decision to stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” with members — who are 56 percent Republican and 20 percent Democrat, according to a first-ever member-wide poll the IAFF hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to design and conduct this year.

The survey showed that 76 percent of members would vote for a candidate who supports their other priorities over one who supports firefighter issues. They also showed that 41 percent think their national union should weigh issues outside its mission, like gun rights, abortion rights and foreign policy, when making endorsements.

California's firefighters aren't too different, according to Tim Edwards, a member of CPF's board and the president of Cal Fire Local 2881, which represents state firefighters. While he didn't disclose the union's partisan breakdown, he said his members are divided in the presidential race. The last time the IAFF declined to make a presidential endorsement was in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee; CPF held off that time, too. “In federal elections, we have let IAFF take the lead,” he said last month.

In California, the 10 elected board members set to decide whether and whom CPF will endorse include union leaders representing Cal Fire workers, firefighters on military bases, Los Angeles County and city firefighters, and municipal departments across the state. They could sway, through the sheer force of their larger numbers, the IAFF’s 10th district, which also includes the key battleground state of Arizona along with Hawaii, New Mexico and Guam.

Not included anywhere in IAFF are Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management firefighters, who are represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees. Compared with municipal firefighters dealing mostly with structure fires, the federal firefighters are the ones most impacted by Trump’s threats, because they are seeing more work as climate change supercharges wildland fires but with historically fewer resources and lower pay.

“From a federal workforce perspective, the cupboard is looking pretty bare,” said Lucas Mayfield, a former federal firefighter and the president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonpartisan group advocating for better working conditions for federal firefighters.

Rice is making his preference clear: “Kamala Harris has always supported California's firefighters, and I expect California's firefighters will use the opportunity of this election to reward leaders who have demonstrated strong support for firefighters and their families,” he said in a statement to POLITICO on Friday.

Debra Kahn contributed to this report.

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