Kamala Harris Headed Back To Michigan — And A Showdown With Trump

LANSING, Mich. ― Vice President Kamala Harris is coming back to Michigan on Friday in yet another bid to show that she’s the presidential candidate who will fight for the American auto industry and its workers.

But this time she’ll make her case in the shadow of a factory whose future might literally depend on what happens in the election.

As part of a daylong trek across the state, Harris plans to speak at an invitation-only event in Lansing, which is home to a sprawling General Motors assembly plant just south of downtown.

GM plans to overhaul the factory, in order to produce electric vehicles, using a $500 million federal grant it won in July. The company has said that the transformation will save more than 650 unionized jobs that it might otherwise have to cut, and add 50 new ones.

The grant will come through a Department of Energy program created by the Inflation Reduction Act, the sweeping clean energy and health care legislation that Democrats passed and President Joe Biden signed in 2022.

It is also part of a broader Democratic Party effort to support and encourage the production of electric vehicles (EVs) on the theory that such support will allow American automakers to stay competitive as demand for EVs increases both here and abroad.

Harris is sure to cite the investment and job projection as signs of how the administration’s policies are working to the benefit of American workers.

But she is just as sure to make a warning: that the factory’s jobs will be at risk if Republican nominee Donald Trump wins in November.

For more than a year, Trump has been predicting that the push for EVs will ruin the auto industry and cause a “bloodbath” for its workers by forcing companies like GM to make unprofitable cars that most American consumers won’t want to buy.

Trump likes to describe the combination of federal subsidies and new, tighter emission standards as an “EV mandate,” one that he says he is determined to repeal. In May, he told a Wisconsin audience that, “upon taking office, I will impose an immediate moratorium on all new spending grants and giveaways under the Joe Biden mammoth socialist bills, like the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.”

Trump in his typical fashion has not offered more details on what that effort would entail. But recently Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), provided more clues when reporters at the Detroit News asked about the $500 million grant for Lansing’s GM plant.

Vance refused to say whether a Trump administration would honor that grant. When reporters from the Detroit News pressed him about the possible effect of pulling back on that money, Vance called the 650-plus jobs that might be at stake in Lansing “table scraps” relative to the jobs he believed the EV push would ultimately jeopardize.

Exactly how much leeway Trump as president would have to hold up or pull back the grant is unclear. Whether he’d use that leeway is impossible to know.

But in an October call with reporters following Vance’s comments, a Harris campaign senior adviser, Gene Sperling, said the process of solidifying a grant after its announcement can take several months, long enough to take it into the next White House administration.

Sperling, a Michigan native who worked closely with the auto industry during previous stints in the Biden and Obama administrations, said workers “now have to and should worry about who, you know, whether that money will come through because of who will be, who will be the president.”

The debate over EVs and the auto industry isn’t just playing out in the presidential campaign.

Michigan has an open Senate seat this year, thanks to the retirement of longtime Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow.

Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman who is the GOP nominee, has been pounding away at the EV issue for months, arguing, as he did during a televised debate on Monday, that “I just don’t think it will work. I think it’s a bad investment. We ought to step back and let the market fix this.”

At the center of his arguments ― and Trump and Vance’s, too ― is the role of China.

As these Republicans see it, support for EVs will end up helping Chinese companies that are well on their way to dominating the market for raw materials, component parts and the vehicles themselves.

“You’re promoting Chinese technology in America ― it’s wrong,” Rogers said.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin, his Democratic opponent, has pushed back just as relentlessly, arguing the support for EVs is not a mandate. “I don’t care what kind of car you want to drive,” she likes to say.

And while Slotkin has said she agrees Chinese competitors are a threat, she’s said the best way to keep American industry competitive is to provide the same kind of EV support the Chinese government gave to its industry. That way, Slotkin has said, U.S. companies can catch up and stake their own claim to the market as it evolves.

“I want that manufacturing here,” Slotkin said in the Senate race debate.

This week, Slotkin’s campaign rolled out a new video advertisement seizing on Rogers’ comments.

“This factory is being upgraded, and will save 700 mid-Michigan auto jobs,” the narrator says. “But Mike Rogers says, ‘I think it’s a bad investment.’ Keeping auto jobs in Michigan, not China, is never a bad investment.”

Harris, seizing on Vance’s comments, made similar comments during a visit to Flint two weeks ago.

“We want to make sure the next breakthroughs are not only invented but built here in America, by American union workers,” Harris said.

Lurking behind all of this are the latest trends in the auto industry and a disagreement about what they mean.

EV sales have come in below projections, while the construction of charging networks big enough to assure wary consumers is behind schedule ― both clear signs, according to Trump and his allies, that the Democratic efforts are a boondoggle.

“The financial pain is growing,” an article on the conservative Wall Street Journal’s editorial page warned earlier this month.

In March, the Biden administration announced it was modifying the timeline of its new emission standards in response to industry concerns that the previously proposed limits would force too quick an adjustment.

But EV sales are still increasing. The general consensus among industry analysts is that the transition from internal combustion engines (ICEs) to more fuel-efficient, more electrified vehicles is going to happen one way or another, with the only questions being how quickly and under what circumstances ― and how many vehicles can be built here.

“This transition is not going away,” Corey Cantor, senior associate for electric vehicles at BloombergNEF, told HuffPost over email, “so a new Congress and President will have to navigate how to grow U.S. efforts on electric vehicles or likely cede further ground to China and other countries by ignoring this key global market shift.”

K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior vice president of the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research, agreed. “The end game is not ICEs, it’s EVs,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “The question is what’s the best glide path, the least painful glide path, the most profitable glide path.”

And though Prasad said he didn’t know enough specifics to predict what canceling the Lansing grant might mean, he said that, in general, “if you pull the plug on that, you’ll have a loss of jobs.”

Michigan may feel like the center of the political universe on Friday.

Harris is starting her trip across the state with an appearance in Grand Rapids and, after the Lansing stop, finishing with a rally in the northern Detroit suburbs. Trump is also coming to Detroit on Friday, starting with an afternoon town-hall-style event in those same northern suburbs.

In the evening, Trump will hold a rally at Huntington Place, the downtown convention center, where election ballots were counted in 2020. Trump supporters famously staged angry protests at the meeting hall, then named the TCF Center, and made unfounded claims of ballot tampering.

Federal prosecutor Jack Smith has focused on those demonstrations in his indictment claiming Trump conspired to overturn valid election results. The document alleges, among other things, that a Trump official told a colleague to “make them riot.”

The Trump campaign has called Smith’s indictment “falsehood-ridden” and part of an effort to weaponize the government against him.

Although Friday represents the first time the two candidates will cross paths in Michigan, it’s hardly the first time either has been here and certainly won’t be the last. That’s because Michigan is among a handful of politically divided states whose election results could determine control of the White House and the Senate, and maybe the House as well.

The EV debate is not the most important one on the minds of Michigan voters, political professionals on both sides have told HuffPost. But the speeches and ads are proof all the campaigns think the issue resonates enough to move votes that could matter in a tight election.

And it’s not just in Michigan where the EV debate could get voter attention. New federal subsidies are underwriting EV and related projects across the country, including in at least four other swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

“It’s a lot bigger than just the Lansing Grand River investment,” Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, said on the mid-October call arranged by the Harris campaign. “It’s factories all over the United States and it’s supply chain factories all over the United States that are being put in place now.”

And that’s to say nothing of the broader cultural significance of the debate, at a time when both presidential candidates are fighting over the allegiance of working-class voters. That, too, resonates beyond Michigan.