Harris, Walz start hitting Trump on manufacturing in bid for working class voters

Kamala Harris rarely talked about manufacturing or blue-collar jobs 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 slammed former President Donald Trump in Warren, Michigan, on Friday over factory closures that occurred on Trump’s watch and warned that Trump’s pledge to repeal the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act would rip away hundreds of billions of dollars meant for clean energy manufacturing in Michigan and other Rust Belt states. Walz also defended the city of Detroit, which Trump described as a “mess” in speech at the Detroit Economic Club Thursday — a comment Democrats quickly seized on.

“But if the guy were to ever spend any time in the Midwest, like all of us know, [he'd] know Detroit's experiencing an American comeback and renaissance,” Walz said. “City's growing. Crime is down. Factories are opening up. But those guys, all they know about manufacturing is manufacturing bullshit.”

It’s the latest in an escalating series of attacks both Walz and Harris have been making on Trump’s manufacturing record — a centerpiece of the Republican’s campaign. And it comes as new polls show Trump edging ahead in Michigan , a critical part of Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall” in the upper Midwest. The race is similarly 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 manual workers . And it’s intensifying concerns that Harris’ failure to make inroads with blue-collar workers in those places could cost her the election.

Her campaign now seems to be trying to address those concerns. After spending the early weeks of her campaign focused on cost-of-living issues like grocery prices and housing, the vice president and her top surrogates are increasingly talking up the manufacturing gains made under her current boss, President Joe Biden, and going after Trump’s 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 manufacturing out of Michigan and go to anti-union states so they could pay their workers less,” a reference to comments Trump made to The Detroit News in 2015 .

Walz added that Trump “was asleep at the wheel [to] China's advantage,” when he was president. “And now he says we should just let China dominate the auto industry.”

Last weekend, the campaign dispatched populist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, whose union has endorsed Harris, to assail Trump for his plans to “kill” a $500 million investment in an electric vehicle plant outside Lansing funded by the IRA. Harris also hit on that point in remarks in Flint last Friday, while also pointing out the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs that happened on Trump’s watch, including the closing of auto plants in Michigan. She made similar appeals to blue collar workers and labor unions in a major speech late last month at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh.

“She ripped him hard [in Pennsylvania], and she ripped him hard in Flint” over manufacturing, Harris campaign economics adviser Gene Sperling told reporters Thursday. “You’re seeing it, and you’re going to see more.”

Given Walz’s Midwestern roots and union ties, the campaign has leaned on him to reach out to blue-collar workers in the region. But the former congressman and teacher has his own issues regarding industrial policy that make for an awkward dance in must-win Michigan. As a moderate House Democrat in 2008, he opposed the UAW-backed auto industry bailout Congress passed in the wake of the Great Recession that is widely credited with saving 1.5 million jobs. That 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 skewered Republicans who opposed the bailout.

The Harris campaign downplays the shift toward more manufacturing rhetoric, instead saying the candidate is “broadening the message” on economics from her earlier focus on child tax credits, housing and combating inflation. A campaign staffer pointed to earlier campaign stops at union halls and labor-focused events the vice president has appeared at since becoming the top of the ticket in late July, as well as her record in taking on corporate abuses as attorney general of California, as evidence of her past populist bona fides.

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

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

“The Democrats have a brand problem with working-class, non-college voters. It started with white workers and then it's turned into black workers and Latino workers,” said Ryan, who outperformed President Joe Biden with working class voters in Ohio in 2022, despite losing his race. “We have got to rehabilitate our brand with those voters, and that's gonna 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 accomplishment — the Inflation Reduction Act and its hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing incentives. And they are warning that Trump is a threat to that funding, if he wins in November.

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

Trump has pledged to rescind all “unspent” funds from that law — the vast majority of which have not been doled out to factories yet. And JD Vance this month refused to commit to keeping Michigan industrial investments in place funded by the measure, like the $500 million for the Lansing EV plant.

Democrats have spent the last week in Michigan hammering Republicans up and down the ticket on the subject. On Tuesday, Rep. Elissa Slotkin , the Democrats’ candidate for U.S. Senate, said during a debate that her GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, is “happy 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 tried to walk back his and Trump’s earlier comments on the Inflation Reduction Act, saying “neither me nor President Trump has ever said that we want to take any money that’s going to Michigan auto workers,” before pivoting to argue that the IRA funding is “table scraps” compared to the cost the auto industry will bear to convert to electric vehicles — the target of many of the investments.

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

“Table scraps. Tell that to 650 families who feed their families with those table scrap jobs,” Walz said. “Look, we got to talk to our neighbors. These guys couldn't give a damn about Michigan workers.”

It’s the type of exchange Harris’ allies in the labor movement want to see a lot more often.

“The one thing I would say that the Biden and Kamala Harris team hasn't done enough of, in my opinion, is talk about the great work they've done,” the UAW’s Fain said during a virtual press conference ahead of Trump’s campaign stops in Walker and Warren, Michigan, last month. Fain called Trump’s attempts to appeal to working class voters “criminal,” given his track record on labor.

Labor and working class advocates say Harris and other Democrats will need to double down on those efforts in the final days of the campaign, or risk losing the historic base of their party — and the election.

“They’re getting the memo,” said Maurice Mitchell, head of the Working Families Party, a progressive party that typically backs Democrats and published research on reaching out to working-class voters . “I’m confident that they are seeing the same data that we're seeing: that the path to victory in this race is through the working class.”

Brittany Gibson contributed to this report.