Instinct told him to run.

But David Simmons stood his ground, took his time even though the seconds ticking away felt like hours, and shut down the flaming machinery at a Southern California oil refinery, averting tragedy.

Simmons chuckles as he relates the story years later, recalling how water from the fire brigade’s high-pressure hoses bounced him around as he wrestled a wrench around a valve in order to close it.

Because so many workers have jobs requiring them to prove their mettle every day—those on the front lines in steel mills, chemical plants, nuclear energy sites and hospitals, among others—Simmons expects America’s president to model courage, too.

Not the toxic, divisive bravado of Donald Trump, stresses Simmons, but the inspiring, unifying fortitude of Kamala Harris, who’s calmly stood her ground in the face of craven attacks, laid out real plans for moving the nation forward and focused, just like he did at the refinery, on getting a tough job done.

“She hasn’t gone dark or mean,” noted Simmons, a longtime member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675 who formerly served as a union health and safety representative at a Phillips 66 facility. “She decided, ‘I’m going to be a positive force. I want to be the face of something positive.’”

“We have somebody who’s been responsible, been a great asset to our country,” he said of Harris, noting she entered the race with full understanding of the vitriol she’d face from opponents who have nothing to offer voters but hate. “Do you know how much courage it takes to say, ‘I’m going to go through this anyway?'”

“She isn’t afraid to go into the belly of the beast,” observed Simmons, who's anvassed voters and worked phone banks for Harris’ campaigns.

The unshakable resolve she’s shown in recent months is nothing new.

Simmons, a longtime political activist and labor board representative, noted that Harris overcame numerous naysayers and detractors in 2003 to win a longshot bid for district attorney of San Francisco.

James Evanoff began earning a pension while working at a UPS warehouse in 2001 and continued adding to it when he switched to a job at a small chemical company in suburban Cleveland.

But then a wave of insolvency roiled multiemployer pension funds, threatening to wipe out everything that he and 1.3 million other workers nationwide had spent years—in some cases, decades—building.

Fortunately, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio stepped forward with an unshakable resolve to save their retirements. He spent five years fighting for legislation to shore up the failing plans and ultimately pushed the bill over the finish line in 2021 without a single Republican vote.

Among the 535 members of Congress, only a handful stand with working people so faithfully, and so passionately, that they’re considered part of labor’s family.

Brown is one of them.

“My opinion is, he’s the working people’s champion,” said Evanoff, now a member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 979 who works at the Cleveland-Cliffs mill in Cleveland. “There’s no other way to describe him. He cares about working people, not big business.”

This year alone, Brown joined the USW’s effort to rebuild the domestic shipbuilding industry, helped to secure duties on several countries unlawfully undercutting U.S. shopping bag producers, and urged new limits on imports of oil country tubular goods to support workers in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

And by assailing China’s scheme to dump steel in U.S. markets via Mexico, he’s working to preserve jobs at Evanoff’s mill and others like it.

Just as important, Brown understands that workers need not only a good paycheck but a seat at the table and safe working conditions. He’s a top proponent of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a USW-backed bill that would empower more workers to form unions, and his advocacy with federal safety agencies continues to protect workers from cancer-causing silica and other workplace hazards.

Russell McCarthy takes two forms of insulin, along with various other medications, to help control the diabetes that’s plagued him for decades.

As he worked to lower his blood sugar levels, the prices of his prescriptions continued to rise, costing him thousands of dollars out of pocket every year.

But then President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took a step at once compassionate and sensible. They capped insulin at $35 a month for all Medicare recipients, annually saving retirees like McCarthy thousands of dollars that they’re able to use to pay other bills, spend on local businesses or otherwise pour into the economy.

Even as McCarthy relishes this additional security, however, he knows that the future of accessible, affordable health care will be at risk in the Nov. 5 election.

As vice president, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate two years ago to overcome Republican obstructionism and pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the legislation that curbed skyrocketing insulin costs and delivered other kinds of health care savings to millions of retirees.

Now, Harris wants to build on the IRA, improve the nation’s care system and continue to cut patient costs.

Donald Trump wants to drag the nation backward. His supporters already circle like vultures, eager to conspire with him to roll back the IRA, restrict access to health services, and free drug companies to exploit seniors all over again.

“I am insulin-resistant. I use a lot of insulin,” explained McCarthy, a former steel mill worker and United Steelworkers (USW) activist in Mansfield, Mass., who estimates the $35 cap saves him about $530 a month and nearly $6,400 a year. “The money comes in handy, for sure.”

McCarthy, 70, who’s had complications with his eyes, feet and heart because of diabetes, left the mill and changed careers long before retirement. While he occasionally delayed picking up a prescription to stretch his money over the years, other retirees faced a much grimmer scenario before the IRA.

It broke Cynthia Overby’s heart over the years to see her students struggle to afford menstrual products, try to get by without them or skip school some days for the privacy of home.

The longtime teacher later worked with an Illinois legislator to make these essentials available on college campuses and cheered when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed legislation providing them in his own state’s public schools.

Overby, long active in the United Steelworkers (USW), knows that America’s greatness depends on lifting everyone up and providing opportunity to all. That’s why she became an educator. It’s the reason she’s devoted decades to civic and union activism.

And it’s why she’s voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Walz, in the Nov. 5 presidential election.

Harris and Walz want to empower the disadvantaged, build the middle class and ensure retirement security, harnessing the enormous strides of the past four years to continue America’s march forward.

The other candidates, Donald Trump and JD Vance, threaten all of that. As the two bumble through a campaign devoid of decency, not to mention good ideas, they and their supporters stoop so low as to mock Walz’s kindness for others.

“That a man implemented a policy like that so warms my heart,” said Overby, a member of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) in Granite City, Ill., who has a few choice words of her own for the out-of-touch, low-class Republicans who call Walz “Tampon Tim.”

When she taught children with varying abilities, she told her students, “Help each other.” Now, she devotes part of her retirement to a super-active SOAR chapter that fights childhood hunger, raises scholarships for college students, sends holiday gifts to U.S. troops overseas and supports a local emergency shelter for women and children.

She insists that America’s leaders not only demonstrate the same level of compassion but share her determination to level the playing field for others.