Getty ImagesSpeaking in Detroit on Thursday, Trump attacked UAW President Shawn Fain for his support of electric vehiclesA 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 15 electoral votes, the state is a hefty prize. Biden won it in 2020, by about a three-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.”
