Trump electric vehicle attacks hit home for some Michigan voters

On Friday in Michigan, Harris’s running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz tried to appeal to those sceptical of electric vehicles and took aim at Trump’s claims about mandates.

“It should just be your choice. We need to make those choices affordable and available to people,” he said. “Nobody’s mandating anything to you. If you want to drive, like I do, a ‘79 International Harvester Scout that is sweet as hell … knock yourself out.”

Walz and Trump’s visits to the state comes as recent polls suggest Harris’s support may be slipping slightly in the key battleground state. A September poll from Quinnipiac University found Trump ahead by three points in Michigan, after other polls suggested Harris had been leading by a slim margin for the past month.

Trump’s attacks on electric vehicles are also complicated by one of his biggest supporters, billionaire Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, an electric car company. Musk has endorsed Trump and appeared at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last week, cheering him on from behind the podium.

Appealing to the state’s automobile and union worker population – once a staunchly Democratic voting bloc – will prove key for Harris and Trump to close the gap in Michigan, experts say.

Trump picked up a number of these voters in the state in his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, though President Joe Biden won some of their votes back in 2020. Nationally, Clinton ended up winning 51% of union households, compared to Trump’s 42%, in a race she lost in Michigan by some 10,000 votes. Biden won union households 56% to 40%, according to 2020 exit polls.

Some former Democratic union workers in Michigan have grown disillusioned with the party as the cost of living has risen. Doug, the Warren resident, said adding that pressure from his union leadership to stay in line with Democrats had turned him off.

“You must be a Democrat, or you’re totally exiled,” Doug said.

Harris, he added, was just President Joe Biden “in a nutshell”. “

The vice-president is struggling to win over the labour vote more than Biden, who had cast himself as the most pro-union president in history. Though Harris and Walz have key labour endorsements, they’ve struggled to earn support from rank-and-file union members.

For the first time in three decades, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters – the largest union in the country – declined to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in three decades, finding a majority of its rank-and-file members supported Trump.