Trump electric vehicle attacks hit home for Michigan voters

Speaking in Detroit on Thursday, Trump attacked UAW President Shawn Fain for his support of electric vehicles

A longtime resident of the north Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan, Doug spends part of his days building electric vehicles for Ford as a machine repairman.

But he would never buy one.

A former Democrat and unionised auto worker, Doug - who declined to share his name for fear of pushback from his union - is exactly the type of Michigan voter Donald Trump is working to recruit and Kamala Harris is eager to win back.

With 16 electoral votes, the state is a hefty prize. Biden won it in 2020, by about a thee-point lead, or 150,000 votes. But polls show another Democratic victory is far from certain.

With less than a month before election day, the former president has been stoking fears in the state that Harris wants to ban gas-powered vehicles and that auto workers could lose their jobs in the push to electrify cars. The message is resonating with Doug and some other Michigan voters who spoke to the BBC.

“It could definitely cost us our jobs, and it already has cost a lot of people their jobs,” Doug told the BBC on a sunny October day outside a Meijer supermarket in Warren.

Harris has pushed back on Trump’s rhetoric, telling voters at a rally in Flint, Michigan, last week that her administration would not put a stop to vehicles that use petrol. The vice-president endorsed phasing out petrol cars when she ran for president in 2019, but has since reversed her support for the policy.

“Michigan, let us be clear,” she said in Flint, “Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”

Experts say Trump’s electric vehicle criticism is his Michigan spin on a broader economic message as he tries to appeal to voters in the key midwestern swing state.

Speaking to a crowd of hundreds at a Detroit Economic Club event on Thursday, the former president doubled down on the message, saying that United Automobile Workers president Shawn Fain wanted “all electric cars”, a move Trump said was costing the auto industry their “whole business”.

“That has just become a front message of Republicans: that these plans or hopes to electrify the vehicles are going to destroy the auto industry and take away jobs,” said Jonathan Hanson, a lecturer at University of Michigan’s Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy.

And Harris’s challenges to that message haven’t broken through to some Michigan voters, who still believe Trump’s claim that Harris wants a country of entirely electric vehicles.

“I don’t trust them,” 82-year-old Warren resident Ruth Zimmer said of electric cars. “I want it to be the way it always was, with a good, old-fashioned car.”

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 comments 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, finding a majority of its rank-and-file members supported Trump.

Ruth Zimmer doesn't trust electric vehicles and worries they will cost jobs

In Michigan, where the automotive and transportation industry employ 20% of the workforce, Democrats are not getting as much credit as they had hoped for their electric vehicle investments in the state, said Matt Grossmann, a politics professor at Michigan State University.

This year, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a $1.7b (£1.3b) investment to convert shuttered and struggling auto plants in Michigan and several other mid-western states to manufacture electric vehicles and parts of their supply chain.

“Many in the auto industry and surrounding it don't necessarily think that that would benefit Michigan,” Mr Grossmann said.

Automakers broadly seem to be on board with shifting their fleets over to more electric vehicles, Mr Hanson said, but the transition is expensive and requires complementary investments in factories for special materials such as batteries.

As a part of the nearly $2b federal investment, a General Motors factory in Lansing, Michigan, has received $500m to shift production from petrol to electric vehicles.

In Detroit just two days before Trump arrived, his Republican running mate JD Vance said the Lansing investment was “table scraps” compared to the job losses that would be on the horizon from the shift to electric vehicles.

Kevin Moore, the president of the Teamsters union in Michigan, called Trump and Vance’s electric vehicle claims a “bold-faced lie”.

“They’re not going to get rid of combustible, gas vehicles,” he told the BBC. “They can coincide together.”

His group - and several Teamsters unions in swing states - have endorsed Harris for president.

Moore said he believed Michigan workers would not buy into Trump’s statement that electrification would cost auto workers their jobs.

“They’re astute,” he said of auto workers. “Donald Trump was a gold spoon-fed billionaire. [Harris] lived her life in middle-class America.”

Trump electric vehicle attacks hit home for some Michigan voters (bbc.com)

Trump electric vehicle attacks hit home for some Michigan voters

Trump: I don't want them hurting our car companies

Speaking with Maria Bartiromo, host of Fox News's Sunday Futures, Donald Trump defends his economic plan to significantly raise tariffs.

The plan has received much criticism, including from conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal (WSJ) which reported that Trump's idea of raising tariffs - by 200% - could have severe negative affects.

When Bartiromo asked about the WSJ's report, Trump said the tariffs were going to bring car manufacturing back to the US and "protect" US automakers.

"I'll put 200 or 500%, I don't care, until they can't sell one car here. I don't want them hurting our car companies," Trump said.

"We're not going to let them sell cars from a nice new factory, owned by China, located in Mexico... and destroy what car companies we have left," Trump said.

"We have the golden market. We have the money. If we keep running like we have for the last three to four years, we're going to lose all of that."

 

일반적으로 관세는 국경을 거쳐 수입한 상품들에 적용한다. 관세를 부과하는 방법은 국경에서 직접 징수하는 방법과 구매 전에 수입면허나 허가를 미리 받도록 요구하는 간접적인 방법도 이용된다.

관세를 매기기 위해 상품 가치를 평가하는 방법은 수입국까지 상품을 운반할 수송수단에 짐을 싣는 비용을 상품가격에 포함시킨 것과 상품의 가치와 모든 운송비용 전액을 포함한 가격으로 매매계약을 삼는 것, 수입국 내 상품의 도매가격을 과세기준으로 삼는 방법이 있다.

관세를 부과하는 목적은 정부의 세수를 올리거나 자국 산업을 보호하기 위한 것이다. 관세는 외국인들로부터 세금을 거둘 수 있다는 점, 국내산업 보호를 통해 고용을 증진시킨다는 점 등을 고려한 것이다

한편 관세를 찬성하는 주장에는 각기 그에 대립되는 반대의 주장이 있다. 앞서 말한 바와 같이 관세는 정부세입을 올리기도 하지만, 또 한편으로는 관세대상인 경제활동의 총량을 감소시키기도 한다. 그리고 표면상으로는 외국인이나 외국상품으로부터 세금을 징수하는 것으로 보이지만, 실제로는 국내 소비자들에게 간접적으로 혹은 보이지 않게 세금 부담을 지우는 결과가 될 수도 있다.

뿐만 아니라 공개적인 직접세와 마찬가지로 관세 역시 국내 제조업의 효율을 증진시키는 데 아무런 영향력을 갖지 못할 수도 있다. 관세의 목적이 몇몇 자국산업을 보호하는 것이라면, 이 목적을 위해선 보조금 지급과 같이 보다 직접적이며 효율적인 방법들이 많이 있다. 관세는 국가간의 절충이나 협정에 따라 부과된다(→ 무역협정).