I been in the IAM hall for forty years. Not literally; I was a tank crewman in Third Infantry Division, not a machinist. But I been in enough customer waiting areas and enough union halls in small Southern towns and industrial cities to know what they smell like: old coffee, new grief, and the particular quiet that settles over a room full of people who’ve done the math on a paycheck and know it don’t add up.
I’m thinking about an airport worker in Philadelphia. His name’s Rich Howell, former president of IAM local 1776, and he works the ramp at Philadelphia International. He told a reporter what every working person in this country already knows: “Trump said he was going to bring down the prices a year and a half ago. That was his campaign message. If you go back and see all the promises, there wasn’t one that he held.” That sentence is the whole column. You could stop reading right there and you’d have it.
But the political class hasn’t heard it yet, or they heard it and figured it was noise. So let me lay it out plain.
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers has nearly 700,000 active and retired members. Members who build Boeings in Renton and Everett. Members who work on F-35s at Lockheed. Members who wrench on engines at United Airlines and build motorcycles at Harley-Davidson. These are not abstract constituencies on a consultant’s whiteboard. These are people who show up at six in the morning and do work that keeps other people alive, and they are being told every day that the economy is fine because some number on a screen went up a quarter-point last quarter.
And what the machinists heard when they went out and talked to their own people this summer, member to member, the way union work has always been done, is simple. Cost of living. Gas. Healthcare. Food. Those four words. Not “political centrality.” Not “midterm engagement strategy.” Cost. Of. Living. Gas. Healthcare. Food. You walk into a union hall and ask the people who build the things and fly the planes and keep the machines running what they need, you get the same answer in Phoenix as you get in Fort Worth as you get in Philadelphia: I cannot make this work anymore.
The administration told these people prices would fall on day one. Brian Bryant, the international president, was honest about it. Several machinists, including IAM members, voted for Trump in 2024 because of the promise that the economy would be fixed and things would get cheaper. Now inflation has climbed from 3.0% in January 2025 to 3.4% in August 2026. The Affordable Care Act subsidies expired, and the health insurance bills went up. Gas is running about a dollar a gallon higher because of the administration’s war with Iran. A dollar a gallon. You fill up a tank twice a week, that is real money out of a real family’s pocket, month after month, with no end in sight.
And here is the one that got me, the one where I had to set my coffee down. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last summer included a no-tax-on-overtime deduction. Sounds good, right? Except transportation workers are exempt. The very people who keep the country moving, the airline workers and the freight workers and the ramp agents, do not qualify. Congress carved out the people who do the hardest physical work in the transportation sector and told them they did not deserve the same tax break everyone else got. Shay Blodgett, an Alaska Airlines worker in Phoenix who helps run IAM’s political program in Arizona, said co-workers have been expressing regret over their 2024 votes. That is not a political talking point. That is a man standing on a ramp in Phoenix watching his paycheck shrink and his health insurance bill grow, and saying out loud what he did and why he regrets it.
The Texas story tells you something too. Jason Gayler runs IAM local 776A in Fort Worth, and he said what a lot of people down there know but the national press does not want to print: Texas is more purple than its reputation. And the proof is not a poll. The proof is a name. Taylor Rehmet, president of IAM’s Texas state council, won a special election in January for a state senate seat. The previous presidential ticket carried that district by 17 points. Seventeen points, and a machinist walked in and won it. Not because of some grand strategy. Because he talked to people at their doors about what things cost, and they believed him, because he had been living it right alongside them.
I am thinking about that airport worker in Philadelphia again. Rich Howell. He said something that I want you to hold in your head. “It’s billionaires versus the workers, and that’s the stance we’re making. They are getting rich and we’re paying for it. We’re paying for it out of our pockets.” He also said that more than $1.6 trillion has been poured into the midterms by billionaires so far. That is a number so large it does not mean anything until you stand it next to a ramp agent’s paycheck and a health insurance bill and a tank of gas.
I will tell you what that number means in plain language. It means the people who own the factories and the airlines and the defense contractors have decided they will spend whatever it takes to keep the people who build the planes and fly the planes and fix the planes from having any say in how the country is run. That is what $1.6 trillion buys. Not a better economy. Not cheaper gas. Not affordable healthcare. It buys the right to keep things exactly as they are.
But here is what $1.6 trillion cannot buy. It cannot buy a door knock. It cannot sit across the kitchen table from a woman who is trying to figure out how she is going to pay for her kid’s inhaler and her car insurance in the same month. It cannot stand in a union hall in Phoenix and look a mechanic in the eye and explain why his overtime is not tax-free when the congressman who wrote the bill said it would be. The structural advantage in American politics has always been talking to actual people where they live, and the machinists are one of the largest unions in the country doing that at scale right now, in eight states, with 700,000 members and the kind of door-to-door infrastructure that money cannot replicate.
I am thinking about the guys I served with. The ones who came back from Iraq and went to work at the plants and the refineries and the airports, because that was the work that was there. They did not go into politics. They did not write memos. They went to the shop floor at six in the morning and they built things and they flew things and they fixed things, and at the end of the week they took home a paycheck that was supposed to be enough. A lot of them are machinists now, or their sons and daughters are. And when Bryant says this is the most politically engaged the union has ever been in its history, that is not a press release. That is a statement from a man who knows his members are hurting, and knows that the only thing standing between them and the next eight years of the same broken promises is whether they can get enough of their own people to the polls in November.
The PAC money tells you one story. The kitchen table tells you another. And in the kitchen table version, a gallon of gas costs a dollar more than it did a year and a half ago, and the health insurance premium went up again, and the overtime check got taxed the same as it always did because Congress wrote the exemption to exclude the people who work the hardest. That is the story the machinists are carrying into eight battleground states, member to member, door to door, the way working-class power has always been built. Not with a strategy memo. With a conversation at the parts counter, a knock on the front door, a question that has only one honest answer: are you better off than you were a year and a half ago? And the answer, for millions of working people, is the same answer it always is when the political class forgets who they work for: no.