On the eve of the 2016 election, Trump held his final pre-election rally in Grand Rapids, MI, a state so solidly blue that Hillary Clinton didn’t even bother to add it to her campaign schedule. One of the largest factors in Michigan being a blue state, is the union influence on blue collar workers, and of course, massive donations from union bosses to Democrat candidates.
After Trump’s final rally in Grand Rapids, MI, Patty from 100 Percent Fed Up caught up with Terry Bowman, a UAW member who’s worked on the assembly line at Ford Motor Company for 20 years. Bowman predicted that union workers in Michigan and other key states were planning to vote for the pro- manufacturing jobs candidate, President Trump. Bowman claims that union officials were spending “hundreds of millions to shove Hillary Clinton down our throats,” saying the “rank and file workers are rejecting” the union leaders demands that they support the Democrat candidate. Bowman said that in his “twenty years of working for Ford” he has “never witnessed” union workers openly supporting a Republican candidate for President. He also predicted Trump would take Michigan, a blue state that hasn’t elected a Republican President since Ronald Reagan. Everything he said turned out to be true.
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Since he was elected, President Trump has proven over and over again that he’s a champion for the blue-collar worker, putting their jobs before relationships with CEO’s of large corportations.
Last november, General Motors announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs and close manufacturing sites in Lordstown as well as Detroit-Hamtramck, Mich., and Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. It also announced at the time that it planned to close auto parts factories in Warren, Mich., and White Marsh, Md.
President Trump immediately called out GM and their CEO Mary Barra on her decision to shut down the Lordstown, Ohio plant in a series of tweets:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1107607058600349696
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1107608921370513408
The Washington Post traveled to the Lordstown plant in Ohio to discuss the issue of the plant closing. Plant workers told the anti-Trump media that they were in shock over GM’s decision to close the plant. One of the orkers said he just hopes “Trump will do something.” Another worker who told the Washington Post that she doesn’t think anything can be done to save the jobs.
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Only two months later, President Trump announced on Twitter that General Motors is selling their Lordstown plant to Workhouse Group, Inc., an electric truck and drone maker. Trump announced that the purchase of the former GM plant would bring 450 new jobs back to the area devastated by GM’s decision to shut down the Ohio plant.
GREAT NEWS FOR OHIO! Just spoke to Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, who informed me that, subject to a UAW agreement etc., GM will be selling their beautiful Lordstown Plant to Workhorse, where they plan to build Electric Trucks. GM will also be spending $700,000,000 in Ohio…
….in 3 separate locations, creating another 450 jobs. I have been working nicely with GM to get this done. Thank you to Mary B, your GREAT Governor, and Senator Rob Portman. With all the car companies coming back, and much more, THE USA IS BOOMING!
Jobs for blue collar workers were never a priority for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. They had more pressing issues like starting race wars and spreading hatred towards our law enforcement officers.
Six months ago, Forbes wrote a great piece that outlined how President Trump is saving the manufacturing industry, as he fights to keep jobs in America.
The Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, six months into former President Obama’s first term. The economy continued to shed jobs until the following March. Manufacturing was particularly hard hit, with almost 2.3 million manufacturing jobs—some 1 in 6—lost between January 2008 and March 2010.
As is the case during recoveries, jobs bounced back, with seasonally adjusted nonfarm employment expanding almost 12% from March 2010 until January 2017, when President Obama handed over the presidency to Donald Trump.
But during the same period, manufacturing employment grew only 7.7% with manufacturing payrolls virtually flat in the last 21 months of the Obama administration.
We were told it was the new normal.
At a town hall in June 2016, President Obama famously said that some manufacturing jobs “are just not going to come back.” He went on to mock then-candidate Trump by saying he’d need a “magic wand” to make good on this manufacturing job promises.
Three things likely sparked this manufacturing jobs spike.
First, eight years of the Obama Administration’s piling on regulation upon regulation, from labor rules, to the Clean Power Plan, to the implementation of ObamaCare, placed industry into a defensive crouch. Business leaders were fearful of investing capital, not knowing how the federal rules might capriciously change, thus wiping out their expected return on investment.
That defensiveness ended in November 2016 when the expectations of additional regulatory burdens under a prospective President Clinton vanished. Not coincidentally, manufacturing employment started its sustained upswing the very month of Krugman’s tweet.
Second, the Trump Administration’s deregulatory practice exceeded expectations, with red tape being cut at a faster clip than achieved under President Ronald Reagan 36 years earlier.
Third, with the Republican Congress, President Trump delivered on a major overhaul of the tax code, including a significant cut to business taxes as well as a change to the treatment of overseas profits that incentivized the repatriation of some $300 billion in the first quarter of 2018 out of what the Federal Reserve estimates is $1 trillion in multinational profits held abroad.
Whether this manufacturing jobs boom will continue is now largely dependent on the Trump Administration’s high-stakes trade stand-off with the People’s Republic of China.
The Democrats, who must win blue states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin just got some very bad news about Joe Biden, the frontrunner in their party who plans to take on President Trump in these states that rely heavily on manufacturing.
The Washington Examiner reports – Former Vice President Joe Biden’s hope of riding the support of blue-collar workers and older voters to the White House has hit a wall called President Trump.
In a survey of key battleground states conducted after Biden entered the 2020 Democratic primary, Trump not only has a 46%-44% edge, but he has a 26-point lead among non-college educated workers earning $75,000 or less, considered the blue-collar base and a Biden target.
What’s more, the battleground state survey from WPA Intelligence showed that Trump does better with Biden’s other main support group, older voters, and has a 48%-44% lead over Biden in Florida, dubbed the Democrat’s “firewall.”
“Biden may be a blue-collar guy, but that doesn’t mean the policies of the left or the Democratic brand will suddenly recover with blue-collar voters,” said WPA Intelligence CEO Chris Wilson.
“President Trump has done a good job both rhetorically, and with policy, making it clear that he cares about working-class Americans to the extent that these voters should be considered Trump base voters,” added Wilson.
Wilson’s survey was the latest to also show a Trump recovery in the suburbs and with women.
His poll not only tested the presidential rankings in states Trump won in 2016 — Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — but also Trump’s trade policies and handling of a fight with Qatar over subsidizing its Qatar Airways and flooding U.S. routes in violation of an open-skies agreement that shuns subsidized airlines.
