ANN ARBOR, Michigan — As vice president, Kamala Harris has been part of an administration that’s poured more than $50 billion into Rust Belt industry and infrastructure. As the Democrats’ nominee for president, she is hardly mentioning the massive spending as she woos voters in the crucial region.
Instead, Harris and her surrogates are focusing their economic pitch on the “care economy” — policies to expand child care, make housing more affordable and help small businesses — the focus of her first economic speech in August, as well as in a new TV ad. It’s a major pivot from her current boss, President Joe Biden, who made rebuilding domestic manufacturing a core part of his message to voters in the so-called Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, before his reelection bid collapsed in July.
Biden “is a car guy, like I’m a car girl,” said Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell (D), who appeared alongside Biden at a Sept. 6 rally in Ann Arbor, where he touted his administration’s massive investment in manufacturing and electric vehicles. Talking about industrial policy “is just natural for us.”
“She’s learning,” Dingell added of Harris. “She’s from California, but she still cares a lot about the industry.”
The Harris campaign did not comment directly on the policy shift, instead pointing to her new ad on the economy, and saying it makes sense for the former senator and California attorney general to focus on different policy areas than Biden — a son of Scranton, Pennsylvania whose career was built on connecting with blue-collar union workers. And there’s some evidence that the messaging shift is working. Harris has cut into former President Donald Trump’s lead on the economy in recent national polls, as well as in new polling from Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania out this week.
But the pivot is also raising concerns among some Democrats in the upper Midwest, who worry she risks losing some of the working-class voters that helped the party win the White House and Senate in 2020. That concern has been bolstered by other recent surveys that show Harris losing non-college educated voters by a much wider margin than Biden did in 2020.
On Wednesday, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters — a powerful labor union deeply connected to working class voters in the Midwest and other battleground states — announced it would not endorse a candidate in the presidential race. The move was a blow to Harris after Teamsters endorsed Biden in 2020 and have consistently supported the Democratic nominees over the past several decades. And it came after new internal polls showed that nearly 60 percent of the union’s members supported Trump, a flip from an earlier straw poll, where Biden topped Trump 46 to 37 percent.
The divide reflects the continuing transformation of the Democratic party from its traditional working-class base — exemplified by Biden, a 50-plus year veteran of party politics — and its expanding ranks of professional class voters, many of whom are newly energized at Harris’ candidacy. That has Democrats who still rely on working-class voters, particularly union members, worried.
“Consider me in the camp pushing on our future president to keep that industrial policy front and center,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic nominee for a hotly contested U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, said after a campaign event in Macomb County, a critical swing region of the state. “If you’re not talking about the economy and the future of work in the Midwest, you’re having half a conversation with the voters.”
Flint-area Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), echoed Slotkin’s warning. “I think it makes a difference in Michigan to be able to point to those things,” Kildee, who is not running for reelection, said of the industrial policies. “In my district alone, two really significant new manufacturing facilities” are being built, he added, “So, I strongly encourage anybody who is carrying the message of the Democrats right now to remind people that we have an industrial policy, and they [Republicans] don’t.”
Biden spent much of his term on policies designed to keep working-class voters in the Democratic camp — expanding Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports, vocally supporting unions and authorizing over a trillion dollars in manufacturing and infrastructure investments through the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS Act, and bipartisan infrastructure law. And the president continues to tout those laws and the factories they will fund, even as a lame duck.
“There are going to be millions of people working in those factories,” Biden told a raucous crowd of union voters at the Ann Arbor rally. “And guess what? Once that starts, they are going to create entire communities around them.”
The Harris campaign and her allies point out that manufacturing isn’t altogether absent from her economic message. During the presidential debate, for instance, Harris touted the “800,000 new manufacturing jobs” created while she was vice president.
But the debate itself also hammered home that the manufacturing message is secondary to her other economic priorities. Harris made the comment in the closing stages of the debate, long after a detailed presentation of her plans on child care, housing and small business assistance, and the comment came in response to a question about climate change — not the economy.
Harris aides and key surrogates acknowledge that her economic pitch is more focused on what Democrats want to do in the future, rather than what they’ve accomplished over the past three-and-a-half years.
Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-Va.) said at a virtual small-business roundtable for the Harris campaign on Sept. 6 that voters are happy that the Biden-Harris administration invested in manufacturing and infrastructure. However, they’re more interested in answering the question, “what are you going to do for me going forward? And that’s what we have to focus on.”
Harris’ economic advisers point out that many of the care-related policies she is highlighting in her campaign draw from the Biden-era “Build Back Better” proposals that were jettisoned in congressional negotiations over the IRA and other bills.
“I appreciate that she’s focused on getting the parts of Build Back Better done that we didn’t get done, and I do think that will help her in those states,” added Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a Harris surrogate who has championed industrial policy in the House.
The care economy initiatives are “the unfinished piece” of the Biden-Harris administration’s economic agenda, added a former administration economic official, granted anonymity to detail internal policy discussions. “It’s something that she’s certainly been focused on.”
But some of Democrats’ most faithful voters in Michigan remain unconvinced. Andrew Escobedo, a union plumber and pipe worker apprentice who introduced Biden at his Ann Arbor rally, said Democrats still need to do more to ensure working class voters attribute factory growth to Biden’s industrial policies — a similar conundrum that Democrats face in other Rust Belt states, like Wisconsin.
“A lot of people don’t understand where certain [policies] come from, and so they lean toward more one side,” Escobedo said after the event at the United Association Local 190 training center outside Ann Arbor. “I feel like within the labor workforce [presidential support] is like 50/50 most of the time, but I would still say [many are] just undecided.”
Other union members say it would be hard for Harris to live up to Biden’s record of supporting U.S. factories, and understand why she’s trying to broaden her electoral coalition. Nick Ciaramitaro, a commissioner on the Michigan Public Service Commission and former director of legislation and public policy for Michigan AFSCME Council 25, said that he was “sorry to see” Biden leave the race but is still all-in on Harris.
“She did this reproductive [rights] thing, but that’s because the pollsters are driving them,” Ciaramitaro said after Slotkin’s event in Macomb County. “I wouldn’t say she’s abandoned [industrial policy], but Joe Biden is a once-in-a-lifetime pro-union president.”
A similar sentiment was expressed by Gerald Sommerville, the president of CWA Local 4100 in Detroit, who stood onstage with Biden at the Ann Arbor rally and said that he “wish[ed] he could have ran again.” He and other union voters present were keen to hear how Harris would expand on his industrial policies.
“She has a different background, but still she has President Biden out in front of her,” he said. “So I think if she just piggybacks off of what President Biden has already done, she should be just fine.”
Slotkin’s task is to ensure those union members and their colleagues turn out for her and Harris in November, and she said she will continue pushing Democrats to highlight their industrial policy wins through election day. She said she pushed Harris to redouble her efforts on the industrial economy when the vice president visited Detroit on Labor Day, although Harris didn’t spend much time touting Biden’s industrial wins in her speech.
“Any opportunity I get — and I saw her for a half-a-second backstage — we’re going to be talking about Michigan issues, industrial policy and work — always,” Slotkin said.
