Unions Are Getting More Popular. The Right Isn’t Taking It Well (opens in new tab)

For years, the conservative partisan playbook to win working-class votes was to ignore economic inequality and demagogue the culture war. The journalist Thomas Frank published a best-selling book about this in 2004. “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off,” Frank wrote in What’s the Matter With Kansas.“Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes.”It may be aging now. Public approval of labor unions, which bottomed out during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 at...