Following the recent economic recession, elected officials in many states used budget shortfalls as justification for anti-union legislation. Bills that would weaken or remove collective bargaining rights targeted public sector workers’ unions in particular. Additionally, K-12 teachers—the largest category of organized public sector employees—faced losing tenure protections. This talk will focus on electoral tactics, such as veto referenda or recall campaigns, as one approach to opposing such legislative threats. Methods of placing legislation on the ballot or bringing a vote on whether an elected official should stay in office exist in 34 states, yet teachers’ unions rarely used them in efforts against legislation threatening collective bargaining or tenure rights. Using qualitative comparative analysis, Pullum seeks to determine the causal conditions under which teachers’ unions did not use electoral tactics in states where they had the legal ability to do so. She argues that labor activists’ agency and capacity for strategic innovation was highly limited by state-level political and economic characteristics.