Missouri’s House District 17 sits in the shadow of the Claycomo Ford plant. More than 4,000 union members live in the area, many of them members of the United Auto Workers.
Collectively, they have the power to sway the outcome of what is sure to be a very close race.
Bill Allen won that seat in 2022 by just 60 votes — turning the district Republican after statewide redistricting. He’s running for reelection and is fighting to reach union members who aren’t satisfied with the Democratic party.
Allen’s mom was a boilermaker, which he says saved her life and retirement. Though he was never a union member himself, Allen says he is pro-union and his policies reflect that.
Shirley Mata wants to return the seat to Democrats. She spent nearly 30 years of her career at the Ford plant and is a UAW member.
Mata’s first foray into politics was with the Fight for $15 movement, where she was arrested for a protest in Jefferson City. She’s confident her experience and persistent communication with potential voters will win her the election.
“People are excited that a union member is running for office,” Mata said. “We just need people that live a normal life, that work the jobs on the factory floors to go represent us.”
From the presidential race down to statehouse races, candidates from both parties have been vying for the union vote. Union members — who have reliably voted Democrat since the 1950s — now feel less of an allegiance to either party. Republican candidates down the ballot are working to capitalize on that, while Democrats are working to regain the trust of union workers.
Holding a grudge against political parties
Matt Callahan has been working in Ford plants for 26 years and currently works in the stamping plant for the F-150s. In June, he smoked the meats for a barbecue fundraiser for Mata that raised more than $4,000. But Callahan has not always been this excited for political candidates.
In 1997, Callahan began working at the St. Louis Ford plant. He was a third-generation union worker at that plant and was raised a third-generation Democrat. But when Bill Clinton passed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992, a lot of manufacturing moved overseas.
Callahan believes his St. Louis plant was shut down in 2006 as a direct result. He was permanently laid off.
“My wife was six months pregnant with our youngest,” Callahan said. “They called on a Wednesday and said, ‘Hey, do you want to go work in Flat Rock, Michigan, building Mustangs and Mazda 6s?’ I was like, 'Sure.' Then they're like, ‘You got to be there Monday.’”
With just five day’s notice, he had to move weeks before his family could join him. After four years at the Michigan plant and struggling with the recession, Callahan relocated to the Claycomo plant in 2009 to be closer to relatives.
After that, Callahan said he lost all allegiance to political parties.
“My parents weren't able to see their grandkids because we lived eight hours away in Michigan,” Callahan said. “I still hold that grudge and always will. So now I just pick whatever candidate I choose is best for my family.”
That experience isn’t unique to Callahan. Judy Ancel, a longtime labor educator and host of the Heartland Labor Forum, said Democrats took the labor vote for granted in the ‘90s and early 2000s.
In the 1980s, Reagan-era Republican policies stopped the heyday of union power in its tracks. Ancel said Democrats played a hand in that when they embraced free-trade agreements, like NAFTA, that harmed workers and were “complicit in the deregulation of the economy.”
“It's allowed for a lack of real regulation of corporations, who are increasingly laying off workers, cutting pensions, cutting benefits and shifting costs onto the backs of working people,” Ancel said. “The Democratic Party — along with the Republican Party, which has always been there — has ignored workers. I think that the decline in support by working people in general, including some union members of the Democrats, is a result of that.”
Allen thinks Republicans like him respect the power of unions. He believes his moderate ideas and willingness to fight for unions, like opposing right-to-work bills, make him the best candidate.
“I think more and more people are realizing it's not just about parties,” Allen said. “The parties let all of us down. I think most of us go somewhere in the middle, maybe lean left a little bit right, but most of us want the right thing for our families.”
Union membership peaked in the 1950s when one in three people belonged to organized labor. Today, that’s down to just one in 10 people.
Ancel said that the decline in union density explains the decline in participation in elections — not that members are becoming more Republican. Americans are still twice as likely to believe the Democratic party best serves union workers.
It’s Mata’s mission to get those voters back. District 17 is solidly working class. The area — which covers part of the Northland in Clay County including Claycomo, Pleasant Valley, Randolph and Birmingham — has an average household income of about $33,000.
Mata says that as a working-class person herself, her beliefs on wages and battling inflation align more with District 17’s voters. She points to Allen’s vote in support of phasing out the corporate income tax as a way his votes are making things harder for working people in the district.
Allen says he works to represent all people in the district — from the affluent to the lower-income. House Republicans touted phasing out the tax as a way to make the state more competitive and bring in more jobs.
In 2022, Clay County passed a prevailing wage ordinance — guaranteeing a minimum wage on public works projects based on the average wage for workers in that field. Higher-paid union workers usually set the prevailing wage.
Allen spoke out against the ordinance as a private citizen while he was in office. Today, he says he believes a prevailing wage is best for workers.
“I'm not ashamed to say that my perceptions two years ago have grown and matured,” Allen said. “One of the things that I've heard from people in the last two years, over and over again, is how important prevailing wage is.”
Missouri Democrats only need to flip three seats to break the state’s decades-long Republican supermajority. Mata thinks by talking to people where they are, literally and figuratively, she can bring people back to the Democratic party.
“We all know that we make good wages, we know that we have better safety because we're a union,” Mata said. “I don't care what party you're with. This is about people. I just stand and talk to them like a normal, everyday person because I am.”
'A direct relationship between the ballot box and the bread box'
Brandon Maddock has worked at the Claycomo Ford plant for almost a decade. He works as a utility on the truck side of the plant — a job Maddock believes wouldn’t be possible without pro-labor politicians.
In 2010, Ford announced that it was moving production of the Escape from the Claycomo plant to its plant in Louisville, Kentucky. Facing job cuts, then-Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon signed the Missouri Manufacturing Jobs Act into law to give automotive manufacturers like Ford tax breaks.
In response, the company pumped $400 million into the plant, began making its transit vans there, and hired hundreds of new workers like Maddock.
“The cities of Claycomo, Pleasant Valley, Liberty, if something was to happen to the Claycomo plant, those three towns would just pretty much die,” Maddock said. “A majority of us live in that little 10-minute shot to work every day. We are one of the largest locals within the United Auto Workers, and it continues to grow.”
Since the turn of the century, about two-thirds of union members have voted Democratic in national elections. That number fell to just 51% in 2016, which has caught the attention of Republicans working to secure the working-class vote.
Maddock is disillusioned with the many candidates vying for the working-class vote.
“On the one side, we've just been fed promises (by Republicans), and I've not seen anything accomplished,” Maddock said. “On the other side, at the national level, I feel like it's more of an attention (for Democrats) to get a vote than to really support us.”
Maddock thinks Mata is different. He’s seen how she’s fought for workers at their plant and feels like the district needs an autoworker representing them.
Allen believes he’s different from candidates on both sides. He says he rejects polarizing politics and believes it’s bringing union members to him. He points to one UAW member he spoke to as an example who — after seeing Allen supported unions, the police and gun rights — gave him his support.
“He said, ‘I've never voted for a Republican before, but I feel comfortable about this, I think you really are fighting for all the right things,’” Allen said. “The older Republican ideas, I'm frankly embarrassed about some of them and their views on union labor. They were just wrong. But we've evolved from then.”
Ancel said it’s become popular for politicians from both major parties to court union support after the major strikes and displays of union power in the past few years that have boosted public support for unions.
Jay Bolser is the chair of UAW Local 249’s Community Action Program, which runs the legislative and political side of the union, including endorsements. The union endorsed Mata. When he talks to workers about who to vote for, he tries to leave the culture-war politics out of it.
“You can't go on vacation, you can't buy a house, you can't buy a car, you can't have all those guns if you want to have them, you can't go to that church, you can't go do any of those things without having a good job,” Bolser said. “Walter Reuther, one of the very first presidents of the UAW, had that famous saying: the ballot box directly affects the bread box.”
That saying drives Mata’s campaign. Her priorities include abortion rights, affordable healthcare, funding public education, union protections, as well as better wages and benefits for workers.
Allen’s priorities include education and raising teacher pay, public safety and union protections. He believes independent-minded voters will be drawn to him during the election, even if they vote for Democrats higher up on the ballot.
“I think the best person to represent all workers is the right person to represent this district — union, nonunion, white collar, blue collar,” Allen said. “There are wealthy, affluent folks in our area, and there are certainly working-class folks that need a hand. The right candidate for this particular district has to recognize all of that.”
A challenge to Missouri's abortion ban, and a proposed raise of the minimum wage and mandatory paid sick leave, are on the ballot this November, which Mata believes are working-class issues that will turn people out to vote.
“We have families we're trying to raise and we need to be considered,” Mata said. “I think electing somebody who knows what you're doing to make it and isn't going to vote against you is the way to go. And I'm the right candidate for the job in this district.”
