MILWAUKEE — Democrats made a $1 trillion-plus bet that investing in U.S. manufacturing and industry would reinforce their so-called Blue Wall in the upper Midwest.
It’s crumbling, anyway.
In conversations in and around the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee, where Republicans are currently holding their presidential nominating convention, there are few signs that the industrial policies championed by President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are winning over swing voters — even among some of the workers who have benefited directly from that spending.
“As a blue-collar worker, I don’t feel that Biden has done enough,” said Jake Westray, a union wind turbine repair technician at Ingeteam, a clean energy manufacturer in southwestern Milwaukee — even as he acknowledged that Biden’s policies have been good for the company.
Ingeteam has seen a spike in demand for its wind turbines and electric vehicle chargers in the last two years, thanks to stricter domestic manufacturing rules and more than $1 trillion Democrats have pumped into the clean energy economy since Biden was elected in 2020. That, in turn, has helped the 3,500-person company steadily add jobs — 35 so far this year alone, according to human resources manager Garan Chivinski. And Chivinski noted that the company raised salaries for wind turbine repair technicians like Westray earlier this year after negotiations with the union — amounting to a roughly 16 percent bump across different jobs in the department.
Biden, himself, toured the facility last year to mark the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which committed hundreds of billions in funding for green technology and manufacturing. He is relying in part on accomplishments like these to repel a concerted effort by former President Donald Trump to cut more deeply into Democrats’ support among union members and other working-class voters. Still, many Wisconsin voters aren’t convinced.
“I know that [Biden] poured money into jobs,” Westray said in an interview from Ingeteam’s factory floor in Wisconsin, where he was training a new wind turbine technician. Still, he said persistent inflation means that he’s “leaning red” in the presidential race.
“A lot of people haven’t gotten that wage increase to be able to counteract inflation,” Westray explained. And even if prices have stabilized in recent months, inflation still feels like it’s at an “all-time high,” added Paul Hawver, the technician in training, who also said he’s leaning toward Trump.
That perspective, echoed in conversations with more than two dozen Wisconsin voters in early July, bodes poorly for Biden, who has faced calls to end his campaign after an alarming debate performance last month. It’s also a red flag for Democrats across the upper Midwest, who can’t seem to convince many swing voters the economy is improving, despite a booming job market, slowing inflation and billions of dollars spent to revive the industrial economies of the key swing states. That’s likely to remain a problem for the party even if they replace Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris or someone else at the top of the ticket.
“There’s this kind of wishy-washy thought on the economy,” said Kent Miller, the Wisconsin Laborers’ district council president, whose union members are working at the Paris Solar Project, a solar power and battery project being built south of Milwaukee that has attracted new investments thanks to the tax credits included in the IRA, Democrats’ historic 2022 climate and tax law.
“But if you look at all the other economic indicators, the economy is doing very well,” said Miller, who said there are 150 union members and over 40 apprentices working on the project. “And looking at our [union] membership growth, the work-hour growth … that’s huge.”
Such gains, however, have been overshadowed by cost-of-living concerns, something Republicans have been relentless in pinning on Biden and Democrats in Congress. The Inflation Reduction Act “wasn’t the right name,” Trump told Bloomberg Businessweek in an interview published earlier this week. “It increased inflation and not decreased.”
And they are making a concerted effort to woo union members and other workers with that kind of argument. International Brotherhood of Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien made history Monday when he addressed the Republican convention, and while he didn’t go so far as to endorse Trump, he did note that he’s been happy to find growing support from Republicans for organized labor, including from Trump’s new running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.
Speaking at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, Vance made a direct appeal to “union and nonunion [workers] alike,” arguing the country needs a leader who “will stand up for American companies and American industry. A leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American factories.”
Trump’s chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio, confirmed Tuesday that, in the wake of Biden’s recent struggles and an attempted assassination of Trump over the weekend that has unified Republicans, the campaign believes even traditionally blue Midwestern states like Minnesota are now in play.
That only heightens the challenges Democrats face as they race to help voters make the connection between the party’s industrial policies and the new manufacturing jobs popping up in Milwaukee and other parts of the country.
“When we connect those dots, they get it,” Miller said of his union members. But many workers still don’t recognize “that it’s because of these [federal] investments that we’re securing good contract wins and … we have unemployment at a record, all-time low.”
It’s not for a lack of trying. In addition to Biden’s visit to Ingeteam in August 2023, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm visited Milwaukee twice this spring, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su was in the city in January, as was Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. And Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo was there just last month. All of them tried to hammer home the message that Biden’s policies are fueling an economic revival in this industrial state.
Speaking at a Democratic picnic July 7 outside Madison, Wisconsin, incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin took a similar line, reminding the 40 or so attendees, “I got permanent ‘Buy American’ language in the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill, in the Chips and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act,” ticking off the series of big-ticket funding bills Democrats in Congress passed and Biden signed into law between 2021 and 2023. It was the same message she delivered to voters the day before in Ozaukee County, a swing suburb north of Milwaukee.
Peppered around the picnic grounds: posters touting federal infrastructure spending and job growth across Wisconsin. They were reminders of the boost that Biden’s policies have given to manufacturing nationwide. As of May, Wisconsin has received up to $3.5 billion in funds across the infrastructure law and the IRA, with $3.2 billion in funding awarded under the Infrastructure law and another $335 million in tentative funding decisions announced under the IRA, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal spending data. And that sum doesn’t take into account the domino effects those two laws and the CHIPS Act have set off in the private sector, driving a surge in investment and demand in the clean tech and other manufacturers.
Overall, the U.S. economy now supports almost 13 million manufacturing jobs, a jump from the pandemic low of 11.4 million, and up slightly from the 12.8 million factory jobs that existed under Trump just before Covid-19 shuttered the economy.
But many voters don’t recognize that it’s the Biden administration and Democratic policies helping drive those gains, whereas they do blame Biden and — to a lesser extent — Democrats in Congress for the higher prices they’ve been seeing at the grocery store and the gas pump since the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I think a lot of people are going to vote for Trump, which I think is crazy, because Trump is crazy,” said Magnolia Taylor, a union wind turbine finisher at Ingeteam who plans to vote for Biden. “This economy, it kind of sucks. Gas prices are up, meat is up … but the people’s pay is mostly the same. So the economy is tough for a lot of people.”
Delivering Democrats’ message of economic progress has gotten even tougher in the last few weeks, after Biden’s debate stumbles set off a panic throughout the party — including on the ground in Wisconsin — about his age and health. That has intensified longstanding concerns among Democrats and union leaders in the state that even if Biden’s economy is good on paper, the president himself doesn’t have the ability to get that message through to voters.
“We have some work to do, but we also need people who can speak with conviction and believe in what they’re saying,” said Andrew Hysell, a lawyer for labor unions who’s running for a state Assembly seat northeast of Madison. “The average person really responds to the man-who-must-not-be-named, Donald Trump, because of the way he presents his issues and ideas.”
Baldwin’s approach to that conundrum has been to largely avoid mentioning Biden, even as she touts the economic policies he helped enact. “During the Biden administration” was as close as she got to saying the president’s name during her remarks at the Democratic picnic July 7. She also skipped an event with the president, himself, two days before in Madison.
Both campaigns played down the absence, and Biden’s campaign insisted that it has seen a surge in volunteers since Biden’s debate performance, allowing them “make 100,000 voter contact attempts across the state in the three days following the debate,” according to a campaign official.
But to local Democrats it was an indication that the incumbent senator was distancing herself from Biden — who is down 6 percentage points against Trump in Wisconsin, according to a recent AARP post-debate poll. The same poll shows Baldwin outrunning Biden, and up 5 percentage points against her GOP challenger Eric Hovde.
Baldwin has a successful history of outperforming the top of the ticket thanks to a powerful coalition of Madison liberals, rural moderates, independents and GOP crossover voters. But in the past week, Democratic officials in Wisconsin have privately warned that the must-win state is increasingly out of reach for Biden, and therefore, the presidency. The best-case scenario is that Baldwin provides a sort of floor for a Biden free fall, and, according to one state party official, “that he doesn’t drag her down with him.”
The president has “had the advertising space to himself and he’s still down. He’s still losing support. Whether that stabilizes, it’s unclear,” said another Wisconsin Democrat.
Even if Biden avoids a complete free fall in Wisconsin, he has a lot of ground to make up against Trump, and that’s in good part because his economic message still isn’t resonating.
As the Wisconsin Democrat noted, “Stabilizing is not enough.”
