The industries the unions were targeting to make major gains for all workers included steel and automotive industries, where the employer class was making the biggest profits. The unions knew that the governors controlled the state-based National Guard units. Unions went all out, raising more money for the campaign in 1936 than all previous union donations combined for the elections from 1906 through 1935. They also put record numbers of boots on the ground, not only for FDR, but also for the governorships in Pennsylvania and Michigan, the two states that housed the biggest workforces in the targeted industries. After FDR’s reelection and the election of progressive governors in both of those states, unions started to build the foundation of the American Dream and chip away at inequality. When General Motors workers in Flint, Michigan, held a sit-down strike—they stopped working but stayed in the plants—they prevented any potential replacement scab workers from coming in to replace them. If Michigan’s governor had called out law enforcement to forcefully remove the striking workers, GM management would have won—but because unions had worked hard to help elect a governor they could better control, they worried less about the threat of law enforcement. Similar dynamics played out in the big steel strikes in Pennsylvania. After much effort on the part of unions, the federal government occasionally sent those forces first to defend unionizing workers, and, later, African Americans during the civil rights movement. Shifting the federal government’s apparatuses toward defending the rights of workers to unionize and strike, and later the rights of African Americans to vote and challenge discrimination, was all it took to build massive, decades-lasting structural achievements.