Vice President Harris on Friday is set to bash former President Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) over autoworker jobs at her campaign rally in Flint, Mich., according to a senior campaign official.
She will be joined in Flint by United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain, who announced the union’s endorsement for the Harris in July.
Harris’s Friday evening remarks will focus on Vance’s lack of commitment to honor the $500 million federal grant the Biden administration gave to General Motors in July to convert a gas-powered car factory in Lansing, Mich., to an electric vehicle (EV) plant. The senator was asked this week by The Detroit News if a future Trump administration would cancel the grant, and Vance told the outlet it came with “some really ridiculous strings” and argued it didn’t protect American jobs.
The vice president plans to argue, in an effort to appeal to autoworkers and the important voting bloc of union workers, that she will support union jobs if elected president. She is expected to argue that a Trump administration would threaten manufacturing jobs.
Harris will also note in her remarks, according to the official, that she cast the tiebreaking vote for the Senate to pass the Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which has funded the grants for EV factories.
The UAW released a statement in response to Vance’s comments to The Detroit News this week, calling Trump and his running mate “a menace to the working class” and said they “are openly threatening to double down on Trump’s legacy of job destruction.”
Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), posted Wednesday on the social platform X that Harris cast the tiebreaking vote, adding, “now JD Vance says he and Trump may shut that plant down. It’s outrageous.”
Michigan is a critical battleground state President Biden won in 2020 and Trump won in 2016. The race is nearly tied in Michigan, with Harris polling at 48.3 percent and Trump at 48.1 percent, according to Decision Desk HQ/ The Hill’s aggregation of polls.