Biden meets with Teamsters as group weighs 2024 endorsement

President Biden met Tuesday with leadership and rank-and-file members of the Teamsters at the union’s Washington, D.C., headquarters to make his case for the group’s endorsement in the 2024 race.

The president spent nearly an hour meeting with Teamsters officials in a closed-door meeting. The union’s president, Sean O’Brien, said afterward he did not anticipate the group making an endorsement in the near future and instead would wait until closer to the election.

In a Fox News interview, O’Brien was complimentary of Biden’s commitment to unions.

“President Biden is very strong on a lot of our issues. All the other candidates, they all support unions, supposedly,” O’Brien told Neil Cavuto. “But President Biden has proven — he’s done a lot of hard work on behalf of unions. And no decision has been made. It won’t be made in the near future. We still got a lot of due diligence to do.”

“And, more importantly, our members, 1.3 million, they are going to be included in the process,” O’Brien continued. “We have got polling going on right now. And we’re going to be having town halls in every single local union to ensure that this decision we make is in the best interest of our members and their families.”

Teamsters officials have previously met with former President Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, as well as third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West.

Biden frequently boasts that he is the most pro-union president in history, and he often credits union labor with forming the backbone of the U.S. economy. Biden walked the picket line with striking United Auto Workers (UAW) members in September, and the group endorsed him earlier this year.

Trump has sought to peel away some of Biden’s support among organized labor, though he has feuded with UAW president Shawn Fain after the group declined to back the former president in 2024, calling him a “dope.”