Anita Dawson grew up in a union family in Kokomo, Indiana, but came to Lansing in 2006 when her local Delphi Corp. plant downsized after the company declared bankruptcy.
“I’ve been hitting the pavement since I was 15,” she said, noting that her mother, a longtime United Auto Workers member, encouraged her political engagement from a young age. “I just brought my fight to Lansing.”
Dawson, 60, a General Motors benefits representative at its Delta Assembly plant, belongs to UAW Local 602. She said she supports Vice President Kamala Harris’ bid for the presidency, in part, because she knows the impact a second Trump term would have on her industry.
“We have 3,000 people at our plant, and whatever happens at the White House will trickle down to us,” Dawson said. “Right now, we have excellent benefits through the UAW, and under Obamacare our children can still be on our healthcare until they’re 26. But if we get a different administration in that office, they’re going to try to take that away.”
She was one among roughly 200 people invited to an invitation-only Harris campaign event at Lansing’s UAW Local 652 union hall Friday (Oct. 18). Dawson only found out about it the night before. She pounced on the opportunity to see the Democratic presidential nominee in person.
The speech was one of Harris’ three appearances in Michigan that day, sandwiched between public rallies in Grand Rapids and Waterford that drew thousands and hundreds, respectively. Harris, 60, used the occasion to reiterate her intent to continue investing in “manufacturing communities like Lansing,” if she wins Nov. 5.
“We will retool existing factories, hire locally and work with unions to create good-paying jobs, including jobs that do not require a college degree, and we will protect the pensions of union workers and retirees,” Harris promised.
She highlighted the 730,000 manufacturing jobs and 20 auto plants created during the Biden administration, contrasting those efforts with the 200,000 jobs she said were lost or sent offshore during Donald Trump’s presidential tenure.
“His track record for the auto industry was a disaster. He promised workers in Warren that the auto industry would ‘not lose one plant’ during his presidency. Then, American automakers announced the closure of six auto plants when he was president, including General Motors in Warren and Stellantis in Detroit,” Harris said.
She reminded listeners that Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, had only recently suggested the possibility of rescinding unspent Inflation Reduction Act funding, which includes $500 million awarded to help facilitate the Lansing Grand River Assembly plant’s transition into an electronic vehicle hub.
Announced by the Biden administration in July, the funding would preserve 650 jobs at the plant, Harris told members in the same union hall those plant workers are affiliated with. She warned that those gains could be erased with a Trump victory.
“Donald Trump is no friend of labor,” she said, motioning for her campaign team to roll a clip of him speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago on Oct. 10.
“They build everything in Germany, and then they assemble it here. They get away with murder because they say, ‘Oh, yes, we’re building it.’ They don’t build … . They take it out of a box and they assemble them. We can have our child do it.” The audience booed.
Said Harris: “He thinks that the value of your work is essentially meaningless. That’s what he’s saying to compare it to child’s work. When we here know the work you do is complex. You do it with great care. You work hard. You are highly skilled. You are highly trained, and the best auto workers in the world is who you are. The best in the world. The best in the world.”
She proceeded to attack Trump’s support for right to work laws, his record of disparaging striking workers and his decision to appear at a nonunion auto factory during a UAW strike last September.
“Here’s the bottom line. Trump’s track record is a disaster for working people, and he is an existential threat to America’s labor movement,” Harris said.
“It’s time to turn the page.”
The message struck a chord with Stellantis workers Tani Jones, 29, and Hazen Turner, 31, who made a two-hour trek from Detroit after they volunteered late Thursday evening to represent their plant at the Lansing event.
“We definitely had to adjust our lives to come here, but we wanted to help the cause,” Jones said. “Michigan is going to make or break this election, and our jobs really are on the line if Trump comes into office again.”
While Jones believes a sizable portion of her co-workers are also partial to Harris, but many avoid saying so to coworkers.
“With everything that’s going on in the world and how adamant the Trump supporters are about getting him elected, I feel like most of the people are kind of scared to show their support. But I know for the fact that the support is absolutely there — it’s like an undercover army. The Trump supporters are just more wild and in your face about it,” she said.
Dawson, Jones and Turner were energized by Harris’ rhetoric. However, elsewhere in Greater Lansing, some locals wondered why the event wasn’t more accessible to the public. Even for those who were invited, details on the time and location were kept under wraps until about 24 hours out.
“I do understand that there’s a message to get about Trump rescinding his support for the Lansing plant,” said Matt Grossman, a Michigan State University political science professor. “But it’s just an interesting juxtaposition, because there is a serious issue about whether they’re going to have a full turnout for students and other local voters.”
The night before Harris’ stop, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer hosted four Democratic governors at the MSU Union. Several students there told City Pulse they were also hoping to see Harris speak the next day, but they hadn’t yet seen any information on how they could attend. They never would.
City Pulse reached out to Harris’ Michigan campaign office for comment.
“Smaller events allow for the vice president to directly engage with and hear from voters, and larger events enable her to widely share the forward-looking vision she has for Michiganders. For events engaging labor and union workers in Michigan, each union distributes Mobilize links to their membership. When venue capacity permits, links are made available to the general public,” a staffer replied via email.
Still, Grossman speculated that the campaign may be “skittish” about announcing events near college towns out of fear of arousing Israel-Hamas War protesters. Michigan notably has more Arab-American residents than any other state, and antiwar protests have taken off at its largest universities.
“They seem to have made some kind of decision that, in Michigan, there’s more wariness about protesters and less willingness to have big, open rallies. Maybe they’ll change that in the final stretch. But if that’s the decision, it has weaknesses in terms of actually getting positive press and mobilizing voters,” Grossman said.
“They do have an event planned with Michelle Obama in Detroit next weekend. So, it’s also possible this has to do with the timing of early voting. But it does seem like there’s been both fewer open events in Michigan and not very much of an announcement in advance,” he added.
Harris stayed in Michigan through Saturday for an appearance at Detroit’s Western International High School. She was back Monday for a moderated conversation with former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, a recently converted supporter.
Trump was also in Michigan on Friday. His campaign rally at Huntington Place in Detroit came just one week after he warned voters in the Economic Club of Chicago interview that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit” under a Harris presidency.
Grossman noted that the Harris campaign’s efforts in Michigan seem far more prominent than they were in 2016, when Hillary Clinton skipped the Mitten State entirely en route to losing the state to Trump by .23%.
“They’ve certainly been in and have spent a lot of money in Michigan, so they’re by no means taking the state for granted. They know their problems here, and they’re trying to address them,” Grossman said.
As of Tuesday (Oct. 22), FiveThirtyEight.com’s compiled Michigan polls had Harris at 47.5% to Trump’s 47.3%.
“If the polling error is the same as it was in 2016 and 2020, Trump still wins. If it was the same as it was in 2012, Harris would win by a comfortable margin,” Grossman predicted. “So, it’s worth keeping in mind that there are still a range of possibilities, even if you believe that the polls are going to be as good as they’ve ever been.”
In 2020, Biden won Michigan by about 3%, with a 64.7% share of the Ingham County vote. About 60% of county voters backed Clinton in 2016, while former President Barack Obama captured nearly 67% of Ingham County en route to winning the state by 16% in 2008. Four years later, he won Ingham by 63% and the state by 54.2% against Michigan native Mitt Romney.
Political affiliations in the United States have shifted considerably since Trump took office, however, and Grossman said the jury is still out on if pollsters have caught up yet. UAW members at Harris’ Lansing event were quick to echo this uncertainty.
“Things are different in every election cycle, but it seems like this one is more divisive than anything. I mean, it’s just astronomical,” fourth-generation Detroit auto worker Joseph Losier said.
Losier, 45, said he was raised by “hardcore Democrats” in a family that’s “been building cars in Detroit since before the UAW even existed.” He’s remained a Democrat, even though many in his extended family have since joined the MAGA tent.
“My dad was a Reagan Democrat, and now he’s a Republican. It’s really sad, because I kind of followed in his footsteps getting involved in the union,” Losier said. “As his generation gets older and older and travels farther away from the plant, they get more conservative. They don’t respect the diversity in society, they go hoarding their money and watching more Fox News. Unfortunately, it’s given them a false sense of reality.”
The rest of his family is “almost all union workers, but not all Democrats,” he added. “A lot of them are big gun advocates, which is one of the things that divides our votes in the working class. I like to call it ‘the three G’s’: guns, Gods and gays.”
Losier said his political activism began “at the plant level” early in his career in the late 1990s. His work led the UAW brass to offer him a special assignment after it endorsed Harris in early August. He was tasked with directing a UAW voter turnout effort for a large swath of Michigan through the union’s Community Action Program, which is funded through voluntary member donations.
While his new role includes promoting Harris at the top of the ticket, Losier said that much of his day-to-day work is centered around helping boost Democrat Carl Marlinga in Michigan’s 10th Congressional District.
These days, the UAW tends to overwhelmingly endorse Democrats. But Losier stressed that those decisions, at their core, remain nonpartisan.
“It all comes down to what they’ve done for labor, and we look at your whole body of work, not just overnight gestures. If you have a track record of voting for working-class families, we’re going to help you out,” he said.
Even after the UAW endorsed Harris, there are inevitably still some pockets of dissent among the union’s members. From Losier’s father to Jones’ “wild” MAGA co-workers, the industry’s rank and file is not exempt from the greater national divide.
Mark Grebner, a longtime Democratic Ingham County commissioner and predictive vote-modeling expert, said Trump’s rise in 2016 caused an “acceleration” of a shift away from traditional voter habits.
“It was true maybe 40 years ago, if you had a map of the United States and shaded in the places that you could get The New York Times delivered, that those were the Republican areas of Michigan, Minnesota or Illinois,” Grebner said. “The places you couldn’t were Democratic. But now, places like Ann Arbor, Grosse Pointe, Stanton, Birmingham, East Grand Rapids and Midland are becoming Democratic strongholds.”
In Greater Lansing, “upper-middle-class areas that before were maybe 50-50 have suddenly shifted, and they’re just overwhelmingly Democratic,” he added. He cited “the most expensive neighborhoods in Okemos,” where 70% of residents now favor Democrats.
Meanwhile, Grebner said, sparse rural towns are growing increasingly distant from opportunities for economic growth, fueling a related conservative resurgence.
“Every place that has a college or an industry that requires literate workers is becoming more Democratic. Places that are hollowed out, where people don’t come back to after they leave for college, are becoming increasingly Republican. That’s really where the division in America is: Those places people don’t go back to,” Grebner said.
To find data supporting this theory, one doesn’t need to go much further than the 2020 polls, Grossman said.
“In 2020, pre-election polls showed that Biden would improve among non-college white voters and that he would do better with older, rural voters. He didn’t, and that was basically the source of the polling error last time,” he said. “People don’t really remember that, because it still predicted Biden winning, but the polling error in 2020 was actually worse than it was in 2016.”
For Grossman, Greater Lansing represents a microcosm of the trends Grebner identified.
“Ingham County is moving toward Democrats and has been since the Trump era, but the rural parts of Eaton and Clinton counties have moved towards Trump during that period,” he said.
From that lens, Harris’ focus on equipping the auto industry with the tools to navigate an industry-wide electronic vehicle overhaul could be the missing ingredient in bringing Michigan’s undecided voters to the table.
But will it be enough to rally the kinds of voters she’ll need to lock down Michigan on Nov. 5?
Losier is banking on it.
“Being on the road for 12 hours a day takes a toll on anyone. People don’t realize how taxing it is on your body and your relationships. I mean, this is harder than building a car,” he said. “But the finish line is right there, and I don’t want to look back and say I didn’t fight hard enough. I don’t want to leave any money on the table. I’m going to play until I’m out of chips, if you will, because this election is that important.”
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