The Nation’s Second-Largest Teachers Union Endorses Kamala Harris for President
Delegates to the American Federation of Teachers 2024 convention voted Monday to put the union’s full political weight behind Harris as the nominee.
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This article is part of The 74’s EDlection 2024 coverage, which takes a look at candidates’ education policies and how they might impact the American education system after the 2024 election.
American Federation of Teachers delegates representing the union’s 1.8 million members overwhelmingly voted to endorse Kamala Harris’s fast-moving bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee today.
“I spoke in support of the resolution — for our students, our patients, our families, our communities, our democracy and ourselves!” union President Randi Weingarten wrote on X from the AFT’s 2024 convention in Houston. “Let’s win this!”
The delegates ratified the AFT Executive Council’s unanimous vote Sunday evening to endorse Harris, mere hours after President Joe Biden upended the race with his historic announcement that he was giving up his embattled candidacy. The council’s swift action positioned the country’s second-largest teachers union as one of the first major labor organizations to get behind the vice president.
“Vice President Harris has fought alongside Joe Biden to deliver historic accomplishments and create a better life for all Americans,” Weingarten said in the statement released early Sunday evening.
“Trump left his successor a country in crisis and chaos, with soaring inflation and an economy in free fall,” she added. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris turned it around. They stabilized schools, saved pensions for hundreds of thousands of retired union workers and remade the economy.”
The AFT has placed its significant political heft alongside other key unions supporting Harris, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the nation’s largest private sector union, and the United Farm Workers, the nation’s largest farm workers’ union.
The labor endorsements followed Biden’s own for Harris and were promptly joined by a chorus of other prominent Democrats, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton and several governors, who were either being considered themselves as potential Biden successors or possible Harris running mates, such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona also came out in support of Harris on Sunday.
After Biden’s announcement, Weingarten scrambled to rewrite some of her planned remarks at the kickoff to the convention, according to reporting from Politico. Just earlier that morning she criticized efforts to push Biden out of the race, telling Weekly Education, “This fantasy that billionaire donors are having, that they can yoke this away from the president because they don’t like his performance at the debate, is wrong.”
By the afternoon, though, she emphasized the importance of uniting around Harris’s candidacy.
In Harris’s 2020 campaign for president, she advocated for universal preschool and free college and called for a $13,500 raise for every teacher by the end of her first term.
Becky Pringle, president of the nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association, took a different approach to the game-changing news, leaving out any mention of Harris in her tweets Sunday thanking President Biden for his service. Instead, she noted that the NEA will “renew our efforts to ensure he is succeeded by a leader equally dedicated to building the future our students, educators, and families deserve.”
The AFT’s full statement can be found below.
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