Former President Donald Trump is following President Joe Biden's historic show of support for striking auto workers in Michigan with a speech Wednesday at a nonunion plant outside Detroit, offering voters in the key battleground state a stark contrast ahead of a possible 2024 rematch.
Trump's trip to Michigan will draw attention away from Biden's appearance Tuesday on a picket line alongside members of the United Auto Workers union and place him at the center of the national conversation surrounding the UAW's strike against the three largest U.S. automakers.
The 2024 Republican frontrunner is expected to use the spotlight to criticize Biden's handling of the economy and policies to speed the auto industry's transition to electric vehicles, themes that Trump has frequently used to court working and middle class voters in Michigan and other industrial states across the Midwest.
"Michigan is a Democratic, blue collar state that does vote Republican when the economy is down and voters are upset with how things are going," Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, told Newsweek. Trump's visit puts "Biden in a tough spot," he added.
The timing of Trump's speech is likely to disrupt the second debate of the 2024 Republican primary season. The debate, featuring a broad field of candidates trailing Trump by double digits in the polls, will take place Wednesday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute in Simi Valley, California. Trump also skipped the first GOP debate in August.
The location of Trump's campaign event also holds a special place in American politics that won't be lost on observers looking for early indicators of the messaging strategy to critical voting blocs throughout the Rust Belt of both the Trump and Biden campaigns.
Trump will deliver his remarks at a plant in Macomb County, the symbolic home of so-called Reagan Democrats—largely white, conservative Democratic voters who began switching parties in the Reagan era and later helped fuel Trump's path to the presidency.
In choosing Macomb County, Trump is tending to his base while also seeking to win back the voters who abandoned him in 2020 to vote for Biden, Marick Masters, a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who studies labor and politics, told Newsweek.
"He's going to stay the reason why working class jobs are threatened is because President Biden's electric vehicle policies are going to bankrupt car companies and send the jobs to China," Masters said.
Trump won Michigan in 2016, part of a wave of surprise victories in left-leaning midwestern states that Hillary Clinton was expected to carry. But Trump's Michigan upset came by a razor-thin margin of 10,704 votes, and in 2020 he lost the state to Biden by 154,188 votes.
Nationwide, union households favored Biden over Trump by 16 percentage points, according to 2020 exit polls. In Michigan, Biden won the union vote by 25 points, exit polls show.
Masters and other experts said that while Trump's populist message may still resonate, his decision to speak at a nonunion plant risks angering union workers at a time of heightened tension between the business community and organized labor.
The auto workers' strike is taking place just two months after UPS and the Teamsters union reached a deal in July to avoid a strike. There have been 975 labor actions across the country so far this year, according to a Cornell University tracker, up from 424 in 2022.
Whatever he says Wednesday, Trump's trip to Michigan is sure to look far different from Biden's.
Biden became the first sitting U.S. president to join a picket line when he made brief remarks to a crowd of UAW workers at a GM plant in Belleville, a small city 40 minutes west of Detroit.
Wearing a UAW hat and shouting into a bullhorn, Biden told UAW workers to "stick with it" in their strike against Ford, GM and Stellantis, the maker of Jeep, Chrysler and Dodge. Biden also called on the car companies to give union workers a significant raise while reminding the auto makers that they were bailed out by taxpayers during the Great Recession.
"We saved them," Biden said. "It's about time for them to step up."
Michigan Democrats predicted that the picket line appearance by Biden, who often describes himself as the "most pro-union president in history," would resonate with voters in the state.
"He's been a union guy" throughout his career, Keith Williams, the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus, told Newsweek. "He's not just going through the motions."
Biden also has a record to run on in a general election matchup against Trump or another Republican that includes infrastructure and manufacturing legislation which will help working families in Michigan, Williams said. Still, he conceded Michigan could be a tossup again in 2024.
"We'll need every vote we can get," Williams said. "It's going to be a close election."
Anuzis, the former Michigan Republican Party chairman, said Biden and Trump's dueling Detroit area events prove how critical the union vote will be in battleground states in 2024.
"Biden is trying to shore up his base and make sure he doesn't lose his support among labor," Anuzis said. "But if Trump can go in and pick off a couple states, like Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania, he's probably the next president."
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Daniel Bush is a White House Correspondent for Newsweek. He reports on President Biden, national politics and foreign affairs. Biden ... Read more
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