AFL-CIO backs Obama, promises voter turnout drive
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The largest U.S. labor federation endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Thursday and promised to launch a huge effort to get union voters to the polls on his behalf in November.
The general board of the AFL-CIO, an umbrella group representing 56 labor unions, voted without opposition to back the Illinois senator in the White House race against Republican John McCain.
"We'll work our hearts out for Barack Obama," said Gerald McEntee, chairman of the AFL-CIO political committee and president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
"Our program is going to be worker to worker and neighbor to neighbor. We're ready to mobilize," said McEntee, who originally supported Obama's Democratic presidential rival Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.
The labor federation has budgeted about $54 million for get-out-the-vote operations on behalf of Obama, and will focus on mobilizing 13 million union members in 24 priority states.
The effort will provide critical grass-roots muscle that could help Obama in blue-collar battleground states, where he had difficulty during the Democratic primaries winning over white working-class voters.
The effort specifically targets the battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the labor group promised to deploy more than 250,000 volunteers for the operation.
All of the unions in the federation expect to spend a total of more than $200 million on behalf of Democratic candidates at all levels of the 2008 election.
The endorsement was no surprise, as the AFL-CIO already had started an information campaign against Arizona Sen. McCain and many of the member unions already had backed Obama -- including unions like AFSCME that had backed Clinton.
The full AFL-CIO declined to make an endorsement in the Democratic race last year, but Clinton's withdrawal earlier this month cleared the way for the move. The group requires the support of union presidents representing two-thirds of the federation's members.
(Editing by Vicki Allen)
(For more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)
