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Democrats spent months hand-wringing about losing their grasp on rank-and-file union members. On Tuesday that was the least of their worries.

Despite persistent fears that labor might break for former President Donald Trump, exit polling showed Vice President Kamala Harris winning voters in union households 55 to 43 percent, roughly on par with President Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. (A separate survey from NBC News had Harris up 10 points among union voters.)

Union leaders were quick to take credit for holding the line, though they acknowledged they faced headwinds from Democrats’ overall economic messaging.

“The labor movement put together probably its most expansive [outreach] program overall, and it had results,” said Jimmy Williams Jr., the head of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.

Still, Williams indicated it wasn’t easy, saying “When you’re dealing with an uphill battle, and the party is lacking a message that resonates with working people, you can only have so much impact.”

And Harris failed to win any of the so-called “Blue Wall” states in the Midwest, where unions are a bigger force than they are in other regions.

“There were much bigger issues afoot for Democrats in this election, but if you’re looking for bright spots, labor was one of them,” said Steve Smith, the AFL-CIO’s deputy director for public affairs.

The federation is an umbrella organization for dozens of unions representing millions of union members and invested heavily in outreach to workers in the lead-up to the election.

“That’s not where the union vote started. That’s where it ended after intensive fieldwork,” Smith said.

Virtually from the moment Harris stepped in to take over as the Democratic standard-bearer from Biden, alarm bells sounded in some quarters about her ability to appeal to union voters. Unlike Biden, who had a strong, mutual attachment to unions, Harris was more of an unknown quantity.

Things didn’t get any brighter when several major unions that previously backed Biden — including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, International Association of Fire Fighters and International Longshoremen’s Association — declined to endorse Harris for various reasons. The United Mine Workers of America was also among those that sat out the presidential race.

Trump made direct appeals to rank-and-file union members, telling them their leadership had abandoned them. During the United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three automakers, he traveled to Detroit to make a pitch for their votes — though he did so at a non-union business.

Labor officials said the Harris campaign’s inability to articulate a compelling economic message to working-class voters, and failure to assuage their concerns about inflation or immigration, worked against unions’ ability to persuade members and non-union voters alike to stick with the Democrats.

“I think we’ve seen for a long time that working-class voters are dissatisfied with the status quo and they want to change,” UNITE HERE President Gwen Mills said. “This sort of outcome has been decades in the making, in terms of attacks on the labor movement, and the weakening of organized labor.”

Unions have historically been the lifeblood of Democrats’ path to victory in key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada — all of which Biden won in 2020 but none of which are on track to go for Harris.

Organized labor — especially in blue-collar industries — now represents just a fraction of the workforce nationwide. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in January reported that only about one in 10 workers was a union member, about half of what it was in 1983.

“When the labor movement only has about 10 percent of the private sector, how much sway can you really have overall?” Williams said.

Union supporters were hopeful that Biden would usher in a revival that would reverse that decadeslong slide. And though organized labor’s popularity has hovered near record highs in recent years, increasing union density has proven to be more stubborn and Trump may not be much help on that front.

In his first term, Trump appointed management-friendly leaders to the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor and other agencies that pushed policies that hemmed in unions’ power.

That will likely continue a second time around, leaving unions with an uphill battle to remain a force in the workplace — though Vice President-elect JD Vance, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and others in the GOP are less reflexively opposed to unions due to their potential as a counterweight to corporate power.

“We’ve said all along that no matter who is in the White House, our fight remains the same,” United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, who regularly denounced Trump as a union-betraying “scab” during the campaign, said in a statement. “It’s time for Washington, D.C. to put up or shut up, no matter the party, no matter the candidate. Will our government stand with the working class, or keep doing the bidding of the billionaires?”

Lawrence Ukenye contributed to this report.