It’s presidential election season. In case you haven’t noticed.

What used to take only a few months, from the summer party conventions to the November elections, has turned into a campaigning process that takes a year or more. For months, political ads have been on television and radio. Newspapers and airwaves are dominated with how the war in Iraq, the job market and the economy will affect the presidential election.

The polls say that this election will probably be similar to the balloting in 2000 – very close. Republican President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry are neck and neck, and voters in the handful of swing states like Michigan will sway the election.

Union members won Michigan for Al Gore in 2000. At the time exit polling by the Voter News Service showed that union members make up just 13 percent of Michigan’s registered voters, but 27 percent of Michigan residents who voted were union members, and 43 percent had a union member in their household. But that was four years ago, and the nation’s political climate has changed dramatically. No one knows how the electorate will react to the first presidential election since 9-11, the nation’s economic situation, the war on terror, and the war with Iraq.

Michigan is known as a swing state because it is so evenly split between Democrats and Republicans that the election could swing either way. And polling indicates that building trades union members, collectively, are among the most Republican-leaning groups in organized labor.

Al Gore won 64 percent of the vote from Michigan union members in 2000, but that means that 36 percent of our state’s union members voted for George W. Bush. Targeting that 36 percent will be Job One for organized labor for the remainder of 2004.