Andrew Stern has this interesting post outlining the huge investment union members and staff members have made to the John Kerry campaign. A couple of points. First, the numbers are staggering. SEIU members signed up 4.5 million new voters (just imagine if that was new union members?), contributed $65 million to various groups committed to electing Kerry, and almost 3,000 members and staff worked full time (2 million hours) on the campaign. Another 50,000 members volunteered time. We’ll see whether all this hard work paid off – it didn’t in the primaries (the SEIU came out early in support of Howard Dean). There is also the question of how the SEIU (and other unions) can maintain its tax-exempt status after its clear direct support of John Kerry – it will be interesting to see how these reported statistics compare to the SEIU’s next LM-2 form which will require them to disclose hours devoted to political campaigning.
