According to prediction markets, Trump’s Labor secretary nominee will get fewer votes than previously thought. Democratic outrage at DOGE’s budget cuts and Elon Musk’s budget cuts are reducing the number of senators willing to confirm Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Secretary of Labor.
Political prediction market platform PredictIt gives Chavez-DeRemer a 59% chance of getting 60 or fewer confirmation votes. On Thursday, the odds of getting more than 85 votes fell from a high of 21% to 4%.
On Thursday, Business Insider reported that Democratic senators were rethinking support for Chavez-DeRemer. They were considering voting against her to protest DOGE, as they did during the confirmation vote for Sean Duffy. Chavez-DeRember could be a close vote despite her common ground with Democrats.
Cases for many votes and far fewer
The Case for 60 or Fewer: Chavez-DeRemer is a pro-union Republican – an ideological shift that MAGA Republicans like Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance have wrought. She previously supported a bill that would have eliminated “right-to-work” states and made it easier to form unions. Those positions have won her some Democrats and lost her some Republicans.
If Chavez-DeRemer lost Democratic votes from DOGE and Republican votes from her previous support for the PRO Act, she could be another close confirmation.
The Case for 85 or More: Although Chavez-DeRemer is controversial among some Republicans, like Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, her pro-labor stance is in line with Democrats and with the MAGA base. The same workers who backed Trump on cultural and anti-government issues were the ones who lost their jobs to international competition over the previous decades and would have benefitted from unions.
Republicans who have embraced Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks could vote for Chavez-DeRemer in droves.
The Case for More Moderate Vote Counts: While Chavez-DeRemer is pro-labor, the Republican Party is still split on labor and capital. Democrats may use their votes on her confirmation as protests, but others still need to please unions that Biden embraced as president.
Since Chavez-DeRemer can pick up Democratic votes, anti-labor Republicans have room to vote against her without endangering Trump’s nominee. That could put her final vote count in the low to mid-sixties, though PredictIt only gives her a 10% chance of 67 to 69 votes.
