Fabrizio found broad bipartisan support for union workers, collective bargaining, and expanded worker protections, even though union leadership registered mixed support: 29% favorable compared to 31% unfavorable. However, the poll registered overwhelming (+85) support among respondents for “requiring a secret ballot for union elections,” including 70% “strongly in support of this and high backing across party lines.”

Back in 2023, former President Joe Biden’s National Labor Relations Board issued a rule granting unions significant leverage over employers while organizing, specifically undermining the importance of so-called secret ballot elections in the process. 

Only 22% of respondents in Fabrizio’s poll supported the NLRB’s 2023 rule “that allowed unions not to use secret ballots,” with 64% opposed. Fabrizio wrote that Republican Congressional candidates “would benefit significantly from supporting overturning this unpopular rule.”

“The initial generic ballot is a statistical dead heat, 44% Democrat – 43% Republican (D+1), but if the Republican candidate supported overturning the NLRB rule so workers could once again rely on secret ballots when voting to unionize, the Republican pulls into a 47% – 36% (R+11) lead, a 12-point shift,” the memo reads. “Among Swing voters, the Republican goes from 1-point ahead to 17-points.”

Fabrizio surveyed 1,000 registered voters nationally via cellphone, landlines, and SMS-to-Web between September 12 and 15, 2025. Respondents were regionally and demographically weighted with a margin of error of 3.1%.

Coalition to Protect American Workers, a conservative activist group launched by veteran Republican operative Marc Short after departing his post as former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff in 2021, commissioned the Fabrizio Ward poll. CPAW recently added Gene Hamilton as a senior adviser. Hamilton is also president of America First Legal, which he co-founded alongside President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller following the president’s first term in office.

“Americans back American workers—but they’re done with union politics,” Hamilton told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “Restoring secret ballots, holding votes on time, and keeping dues focused on paychecks, not politics, is common sense and long overdue.”

People familiar told the Washington Examiner that CPAW will soon begin running a six-figure ad campaign, specifically targeting policymakers in digital and cable television formats, touting Trump’s labor policies ahead of the midterm elections.

“There are good unions and bad unions. Good unions stand up for workers, for fairness, transparency, and better pay, but bad unions like the CWA and SEIU spend money from your paycheck on politics,” a narrator states in CPAW’s ad. “They funnel the dues straight from your paycheck and put it into woke Democrat causes, like all of it. They know it’s wrong. That’s why they don’t want your employer to tell you where your money really goes, but President Trump is putting a stop to it. Good unions fight for workers. Bad unions fight for woke Democrats.”

Still, the NLRB does not currently have a quorum, hampering the board’s ability to propose new rules or roll back existing code. Trump announced two nominations to the board in July, but the Senate had only advanced one out of committee by the start of October when the government shut down.

In 2016, Trump was able to pull away a sizable number of union members in Rust Belt swing states — the so-called Obama-Trump voters — and placed an even greater emphasis on courting labor during his 2024 campaign against Biden, and later, former Vice President Kamala Harris. Though he did not secure as many union endorsements as the Biden-then-Harris ticket, Trump did convince the International Brotherhood of Teamsters not to make an endorsement, marking the first general election cycle in which the Teamsters did not endorse a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.

Trump entered office promising that his tariff and economic policies would usher in an American manufacturing boom. However, the economy has actually bled nearly 50,000 manufacturing jobs since the president announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April.

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“The president is committed to his policies because his policies are working,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Washington Examiner in September when asked about the job losses. “There have been a lot of people fearmongering about inflation in this room, but it just has not come to fruition on a monthly basis. CPI inflation has now come in at or below the market’s expectation for six consecutive months.”