Kamala Harris calls Donald Trump a 'disaster' for Michigan autos. Here are the facts

• Kamala Harris defends record, attacks Donald Trump over Michigan auto industry claims in Flint rally
• Harris. other Democrats criticized recent comments by JD Vance on a $500 million federal grant for General Motors to retool a Lansing plant
• Democrats touted manufacturing gains under Harris, losses under Trump, but failed to acknowledge impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

FLINT — Kamala Harris rallied supporters Friday evening in Flint, seeking to counter Donald Trump’s claims about Michigan’s auto industry and economy while going on the attack herself. 

“We will not be fooled. We will not be gaslighted,” Harris said on stage at the Dort Financial Center. “Donald Trump's track record is a disaster for working people.”

The visit and speakers marked a direct rebuttal of weeks of attacks from Trump, who has claimed that Michigan’s auto industry has been decimated under President Joe Biden and Harris — and that only he can save it. 

Harris and other speakers — including basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson — told an audience of more than 5,000 supporters not to believe the former president’s claims.

“His track record for the auto industry was a disaster,” Harris said, pointing to the closure of General Motors' Warren Assembly Plant and other auto factories when Trump was president. 

Harris also disputed Trump’s repeated claims that she supports an EV mandate, telling Michigan supporters: “Let us be clear, contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”

That's a relatively new tack for Harris, who as a presidential candidate in 2020 proposed limiting new sales to zero-emissions vehicles by 2035 and as a U.S. Senator co-sponsored legislation to require zero emissions by 2040. 

Friday’s comment marked her most forceful repudiation of Trump’s characterization to a Michigan audience. 

The Biden-Harris administration does not have an EV mandate. However, the federal government has set new standards that automakers have said will necessitate more EV and hybrid production.  

Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have made electric vehicle doomsaying a staple of their stump speeches in their frequent Michigan campaign stops. Trump regularly claims that the entirety of Michigan’s auto industry will cease to exist within three years if he is not elected.

Courting union workers

Trump and Harris alike are courting union workers in Michigan, a once reliably Democratic voting bloc that has drifted toward Republicans since Trump’s first campaign in 2016. 

Just two weeks prior, Trump had held a rally in the same venue where he said, among other things, global thermonuclear war was the biggest threat facing Michigan’s auto industry.

A key surrogate, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, addressed the supporters and called Trump the “job-killer-in-chief.”

“When Trump was president, auto plants were closing and he did nothing,” Fain said.

Trump did try to fight GM’s move to close Warren Assembly, threatening to cut all subsidies for the automaker. But the plant closed in 2019. Automakers did announce other investments in Michigan facilities while he was in office. 

Harris visited Redford Township Fire Station earlier in the day, according to White House pool reports, to speak with firefighters, calling attendees "brothers and sisters" in a "house of labor."

‘Underdog’ status

Trump and Harris are effectively in a dead heat in Michigan, where poll averages from FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics and Silver Bulletin have not given her more than a two percentage point lead. 

Harris claimed to be "the underdog" in the contest, but told supporters that "with our help in November, we will win."

Related:

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• Fact-checking the Michigan economy: Prices up. So are wages. What’s true?

With absentee voting underway and just 32 days left in the election, Harris and other Democrats speaking Friday evening turned to get-out-the-vote appeals. 

Johnson, a Lansing native, told the crowd it was “good to be home” and targeted a particularly important group of voters that Trump has also attempted to woo. 

“Our Black men, we gotta get them out to vote,” Johnson said. “Kamala’s opponent promised a lot of things last time to the Black community that he did not deliver on, and we gotta make sure Black men understand that.”

Going after Vance on GM

Speakers stayed tight on the theme of the evening: manufacturing and Michigan’s auto industry, while briefly touching on other key issues for voters like abortion, inflation and the housing shortage.

Harris honed in on comments Vance made this week in Auburn Hills, where in response to a reporter’s question, he would not commit to maintaining a $500 million federal grant the Biden administration awarded GM to retool its Grand River Assembly plant in Lansing for EV production. 

Harris claimed her administration had “saved” the plant.

GM had never announced plans to close the facility. Instead, the automaker said it would halt production of the Camaro at the plant after the 2024 model year, leading to 650 layoffs, according to the Lansing State Journal. 

Now GM will use $900 million of its own cash alongside the federal grant to overhaul the plant. 

A manufacturing ‘boom’?

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who entered the Flint arena to raucous applause, also criticized Vance for failing to commit to the GM grant, calling it an example of Trump failing to stand up for the auto industry. 

“He said he would save all the jobs and bring back American manufacturing, but Donald Trump was all talk,” Whitmer said, calling his record on auto jobs, manufacturing and assisting workers “failure, failure, failure.”

By contrast, Whitmer also claimed the country has experienced a manufacturing “boom” under the Biden-Harris administration

The U.S. has gained about 729,000 manufacturing jobs since Biden and Harris took office, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But many of those could fairly be described as COVID recovery jobs. Compared to February 2020, the U.S. is up about 196,000 manufacturing jobs.

By comparison, the U.S. added 355,000 manufacturing jobs through the first three years of Trump's tenure. Then COVID hit, and Trump’s tenure ended with 178,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than when he took office.

Harris, too, underplayed the impact of the pandemic, calling Trump "one of the biggest losers of manufacturing jobs in American history."

In Michigan, the state had gained about 3,300 manufacturing jobs under Trump before the pandemic but was down 37,200 jobs when he left office. Michigan has added 9,500 manufacturing jobs under Biden-Harris, but is still down from pre-COVID highs, according to the federal data.

An outsourcing claim

Harris also alleged Trump “encouraged automakers to move their plants out of Michigan so they could pay their workers less” in non-union states. 

This is mostly true. In August 2015 Trump suggested to The Detroit News in an interview that, instead of outsourcing manufacturing to Mexico, the plants could be moved to other states where wages are lower.

“You can go to different parts of the United States and then ultimately you’d do full-circle — you’ll come back to Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less,” Trump reportedly told the newspaper. 

While Trump had suggested plants be moved from Michigan, it was in the context of an alternative to outsourcing to Mexico