Harris and Walz begin criticizing Trump over manufacturing in an effort to reach working-class voters

Kamala Harris rarely talked about manufacturing jobs or blue-collar workers when she first became the Democratic presidential nominee. Her campaign is now trying to make up for lost time.

In their most explicit appeal yet, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz on Friday in Warren, Michigan, criticized former President Donald Trump for factory closures that took place under Trump’s watch, and warned that Trump’s promise to pass the Inflation Reduction Act Biden administration to revoke would take away hundreds of people. billions of dollars intended for clean energy production in Michigan and other Rust Belt states. Walz also defended the city of Detroit, which Trump described as a “mess” in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday — a comment that Democrats quickly seized on.

“But if the man ever spent any time in the Midwest, as we all know, he would know that Detroit is experiencing an American comeback and renaissance,” Walz said. ‘The city is growing. Crime has dropped. Factories open. But all those guys know about production is production nonsense.”

It is the latest in an escalating series of attacks that both Walz and Harris have made on Trump’s production record — a focal point of the Republican campaign. And it comes as new polls show Trump gaining a lead in Michigan, a crucial part of Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall” in the upper Midwest. The race is also tight in Pennsylvania, another Rust Belt swing state, with Harris trailing Trump with lower-middle and middle-class voters in the Keystone State, as well as blue-collar voters. And concerns are growing that Harris’ inability to reach workers in those places could cost her the election.

Her campaign now appears to be trying to address those concerns. After spending the first weeks of her campaign focusing on cost-of-living issues such as grocery and housing prices, the vice president and her top surrogates are increasingly talking about the manufacturing gains made under her current boss, President Joe Biden , have been booked and are going after Trump. perceived strength on that front.

“He promised to fight for union workers — repeatedly turned his back on them,” Walz said. “He even encouraged automakers to move production out of Michigan and into anti-union states so they could pay their workers less,” a reference to comments Trump made in 2015 to The Detroit News.

Walz added that Trump was “asleep at the wheel (in) China’s favor” when he was president. “And now he says we should just let China dominate the auto industry.”

Over the weekend, the campaign sent populist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, whose union supported Harris, to attack Trump over his plans to make a $500 million investment in to ‘kill’ an electric vehicle factory. outside Lansing, funded by the IRA. Harris also addressed that point in his remarks in Flint last Friday, while also pointing to the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs that occurred under Trump’s watch, including the closure of auto plants in Michigan. She made a similar appeal to workers and unions in a major speech late last month at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh.

“She ripped it hard (in Pennsylvania), and she ripped it hard in Flint” over production, Harris campaign economic adviser Gene Sperling told reporters Thursday. “You see it, and you will see more.”

Given Walz’s roots in the Midwest and his union ties, the campaign has leaned on him to reach workers in the region. But the former congressman and lecturer has his own industrial policy issues that make for a tricky dance in must-win Michigan. A moderate Democrat in the House of Representatives, in 2008 he opposed the UAW-backed auto industry bailout package passed in the wake of the Great Recession, which is widely credited with saving 1.5 million jobs. The move put him out of step with many in his party, especially in 2012 when Democrats — led by then-Vice President Joe Biden — took a victory lap for saving the U.S. auto industry and Republicans opposed oppose, undermine the rescue plan.

The Harris campaign is downplaying the shift toward more manufacturing rhetoric, saying instead that the candidate is “broadening” the message on the economy from her previous focus on child tax credits, housing and fighting inflation. A campaign staffer pointed to previous campaign stops at union halls and labor-oriented events where the vice president has appeared since becoming the top of the ticket in late July, as well as her record of tackling corporate abuses as California’s attorney general, as evidence of its populist bona fides.

But populist Democrats say more is needed. Former Ohio Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan, who lost to Trump’s running mate JD Vance in the 2022 Ohio Senate race, said the Harris camp is striking the “right chord” by focusing more on production, and encouraged her to bring the issue home in the final weeks of the campaign.

“You can’t hit those messages about manufacturing and industrialization hard enough,” Ryan said, adding that Harris’ problems with working-class voters are part of a long “downward trend” for Democrats with that demographic — a trend that can only happen are reversed by speaking. for their material interests.

“The Democrats have a branding problem with working-class and non-college voters. It started with white workers and then it turned into Black and Latino workers,” said Ryan, who outperformed President Joe Biden among working-class voters in Ohio in 2022 despite losing his race. “We need to rehabilitate our brand with those voters, and that will take some work.”

The Harris campaign hopes to appeal to those voters by portraying Trump’s manufacturing promises as empty rhetoric, in contrast to the Biden administration’s signature achievement — the Inflation Reduction Act and hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing incentives. And they warn that Trump poses a threat to that funding if he wins in November.

“There is the reason that UAW members supported Kamala Harris, and that your president, and many of your members, called him exactly what he was: a scab,” Walz said of Trump.

Trump has promised to revoke all “unspent” funds from that law – the vast majority of which have not yet been distributed to factories. And J.D. Vance this month declined to commit to keeping industrial investments in Michigan funded by the measure, such as the $500 million for the Lansing EV factory, in place.

Democrats have been hammering Republicans up and down on this issue in Michigan this past week. On Tuesday, Rep. said Elissa Slotkin, the Democrats’ candidate for U.S. Senate, during a debate that featured her Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, “likes to let (China) eat our lunch” in the electric vehicle market.

The attacks appear to have Republicans on the defensive. On Tuesday in Michigan, Vance attempted to walk back his and Trump’s previous comments on the Inflation Reduction Act, saying “neither I nor President Trump has ever said we want to take money going to Michigan’s auto workers,” before saying turned around to argue. that the IRA funding is “table scraps” compared to the costs the auto industry will bear to transition to electric vehicles – the target of many of the investments.

Walz jumped on those comments on Friday, noting that Harris was the swing vote for the Inflation Reduction Act and hammering Vance on the “table scraps” comment.

“Table scraps. Tell that to 650 families who feed their families with those table scrap jobs,” Walz said. “Look, we need to talk to our neighbors. These guys couldn’t care less about the workers in Michigan.”

It’s the kind of exchange that Harris’ allies in the labor movement want to see much more often.

“The one thing I would say that I don’t think the Biden and Kamala Harris team has done enough of is talking about the great job they’ve done,” the UAW’s Fain said during a virtual press conference ahead of the campaign. Trump. stops last month in Walker and Warren, Michigan. Fain called Trump’s efforts to appeal to working-class voters “criminal,” given his record on labor.

Labor and working-class advocates say Harris and other Democrats will have to redouble these efforts in the final days of the campaign or risk losing their party’s historic base — and the election.

“They get the memo,” said Maurice Mitchell, head of the Working Families Party, a progressive party that generally supports Democrats and publishes research on reaching working-class voters. “I am confident they see the same data we do: that the path to victory in this race is through the working class.”

Brittany Gibson contributed to this report.