Hillary Clinton could really use strong unions right about now

What if the Democrats had nominated Bernie Sanders? Counterfactuals are always tricky, but it's probably fair to say that the Democratic base would be far more excited than it is today. While some Americans are stoked to pull the lever for Hillary Clinton, polls have repeatedly shown an "enthusiasm gap" between her voters and Donald Trump's. This is basically a mechanical consequence of Clinton's favorability rating being deeply underwater yet still higher than Trump's. So long as Clinton is ahead, Democrats won't be scared enough to enthusiastically support the candidate they just aren't that crazy about.

This tendency can most clearly be seen among young voters, a key part of the Democratic coalition that overwhelmingly supported Sanders. That demographic is so far tending towards third parties far more than in 2008 or 2012.

That gap may be closing, as the election stakes are made more clear, and Democrats continually pound home the odiousness of Trump. Yet it's worth digging into a structural reason why enthusiasm consistently presents a bigger problem for Democrats than Republicans: the decline of unions.

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Republicans don't need to worry about enthusiasm as much, for two reasons. First, they can rely on the class interest of the rich. Promising more tax cuts for people who don't need them is a reliable turnout mechanism for the upper classes. (In general, the richer people are, the more likely they are to vote Republican.) Second, old people skew conservative, and voting likelihood increases steadily with age, basically until you die.

To get out their younger, poorer voters, Democrats have stumbled onto a political model that pushes voting as a sort of branded consumption good. Because taking the time to vote doesn't make much sense on cynical utilitarian grounds (because the chance of your single vote swinging the election is virtually nil), Democrats end up selling voting as part of a package of personal identity branding as much as on material policy grounds: "Yes we can," "We are the ones we've been waiting for," #ImWithHer, "Love trumps hate."

During presidential elections, this works reasonably well, particularly when Democrats have a charismatic candidate. But during midterms, with no famous Democratic leader at the top of the ticket, turnout collapses and Democrats get obliterated. And when the presidential candidate isn't that popular, trying to gin up enthusiasm is an uphill battle.

To be sure, "politics as branded consumption" is a cross-partisan development, probably due as much to cultural evolution as anything else. But relying on it probably hurts Democrats more, particularly during midterms. While Republicans are also very heavily into identity, they have the class interest of the rich to keep their politics somewhat more stabilized. Republicans argue that Democrats do the same thing, of course, citing the Randian point about "takers" voting themselves a share of the economic product made by "job creators." That may be somewhat true with policies like ObamaCare, which did provide some real benefits to a slice of the population. However, just as often the people who benefit most from such policies don't vote at all even when their material interest is clearly at stake, as when Matt Bevin ran for governor of Kentucky loudly promising to slash ObamaCare, and won with only 31 percent turnout, virtually none of them poor.

It wasn't always like this. Unions used to provide an alternative model of mobilizing left-leaning voters. The whole point of a union is to collectively pursue material benefits for the entire membership. And while unions build solidarity partially through identity channels (as does any human institution), the character of union voter mobilization is qualitatively different than the individualized variety dominant today.

In particular, unions are much better at keeping a laser focus on political brass tacks. They find it much more easy to strike a bargain with a candidate, and then vote en masse for her, no matter how inspiring or charismatic she is. That reliability — which contains within it the potential threat of a withdrawal of a large block of support — makes unions formidable political actors. In the postwar generation, they were a hugely important part of the Democratic coalition.

I also suspect union membership makes political engagement less exhausting and anxiety-ridden. When politics is largely about making an individual choice on election day, as Matt Christman argues, people turn to ineffectual shouting on social media as their only political outlet.

But now, unions barely exist. A mere 10 percent of workers belong to a union today — 7 percent of private sector workers, and 36 percent of public sector workers — which is less than half of the level of the postwar generation.

Democrats are as much to blame for this as Republicans — none more so than Jimmy Carter, who won the presidency largely on the strength of union votes. He then proceeded to ignore their favored bills in Congress and appoint as Fed Chair Paul Volcker, a fanatical union-buster who caused a huge recession with the explicit intention of reducing both wages and union strength, so as to crush inflation.

Incidentally, the timing of that recession put Ronald Reagan in the White House, who went on to do some major union-busting himself. It's a great encapsulation of how Democrats' complicity in destroying their own class base has repeatedly come back to harm them politically. So today, after a whole generation of Democrats treating unions with little more than contempt — they barely even tried to pass card check when they had a congressional majority between 2009 and 2010 — it's no surprise that a disturbing fraction of the remaining union members are considering voting for Trump.

At any rate, there's no bringing back unions easily in the short term. But hopefully future Democratic leaders will recognize the wisdom of pushing through pro-union legislation when they get the chance.