MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – The president of the AFL-CIO’s largest union said that Democratic presidential front-runner Howard Dean is in the strongest position to win his union’s endorsement.
“Dean has the strongest base of support,” Andrew Stern, president of the 1.6 million member Service Employees International Union, said Friday. “At our convention, he was mobbed like a rock star. I was surprised.”
The union’s endorsement could help improve Dean’s standing among minority voters. Despite the support, the SEIU recessed a conference of its 1,500 political directors this week by deciding not to endorse any presidential candidate until its next meeting in early November. The executive board of another union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, also chose to delay its endorsement decision after private meetings with the Democratic presidential candidates this week.
Ed Stanak, president of the Vermont State Employees Association, who attended the SEIU event, said he understood that the former Vermont governor was the top vote-getter in a straw vote of participants at the union’s Washington, D.C., convention.
“I know Dean did the best of all the candidates,” Stanak said.
Stern declined to discuss the outcome of the straw vote, other than to say that Dean, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., and Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., were in the top tier at the conclusion of the convention.
The SEIU’s endorsement is coveted because it is the fastest-growing labor union in the country. Many of its members are employed in the janitorial, home care and other service industries.
“Dean told us his crowds are more white than he’d like them to be,” Stern said. “The other thing he said is an endorsement would give him momentum that could lock in his place in the standings.”
Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager, said Dean also tried to win backing from the union by arguing there was a “common synergy” between Dean’s grass-roots organizing success and the union’s outreach to average working people and minorities.
Trippi said the Dean campaign was not disappointed about failing to capture the endorsement at this week’s session. “We went in trying to win it,” he said. “Did we think we would win it? No.”
Last year, Dean endorsed a unionizing effort by 1,100 nurses at Fletcher Allen Health Care, the state’s largest hospital. The nurses voted to unionize and in January, Dean was honored by the AFL-CIO with its first Paul Wellstone Award in honor of the liberal Minnesota U.S. senator who died last year in a plane crash.
AP-ES-09-13-03 1433EDT
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