How do you vote when you make cars you can’t afford? In Detroit, the battle between Trump and Biden for the white working-class vote will be a tough one. “Buying a new car would cost half my annual salary,” says Curtis Cranford, according to AFP.
Biden and TrumpPhoto: Profimedia Images
The 66-year-old worker had just shaken hands with the US president, who on Wednesday briefly joined a picket outside a General Motors plant in Belleville, in the outer suburbs of Detroit, on Tuesday.
He thanked Joe Biden for coming, but because of the energy transition, which “will cost jobs,” and especially because of Democrats’ positions on abortion and immigration, he “will probably vote Republican” next year.
And therefore potentially for Donald Trump, the heavy favorite in the primary election of the conservative party.
For his part, Donald Trump visited a small auto plant near Detroit on Thursday, whose workers are not part of the major auto union, the UAW.
The UAW launched a historic strike against the three major American manufacturers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump are fighting to “win over the working-class electorate, especially white voters,” who will be decisive next year, analyzed Vanderbildt University professor Jefferson Cowie in an interview with NPR radio.
“Will they be seduced by Trump’s usual rhetoric, particularly around race and nationalism? Or will we witness an evolution more towards (…) the somewhat Rooseveltian vision of Biden, that is really the central question,” he sums up.
Trump’s threat
Joe Biden, who relies heavily on union support and promotes his major plans to boost the middle class at every opportunity, is now the first US president to ever join a picket line.
Grabbing a megaphone to encourage the strikers, the 80-year-old Democrat wanted to make a dent in his re-election campaign.
Carolyn Nippa, 51, 26 of whom have worked for GM, still can’t believe she greeted him: “It was surreal.”
“I’m not for Trump. I will say it directly. I think he worked for multinationals and billionaires,” says this worker, who changed factories several times as factories closed.
“If I don’t win the election, the auto workers are done,” the former president said on his Truth Social network.
So, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, who is the champion of workers?
“It’s hard to say,” says Kristy Zometsky, 44, who also works at this General Motors parts plant, like her father and uncle before her.
“This strike is not really a political issue,” she assures us.
Her concerns are the same as those of all the strikers I have met: life is too expensive, wages are not keeping up, despite the sacrifices made in 2009 to save the multinationals.
At this time, during the great economic and financial crisis, Sarah Polk asked herself, “But who really supports us?
The 53-year-old graphic designer I met in downtown Detroit doesn’t work in the auto business, but as an employee of Blue Cross Insurance, she’s still a member of the UAW and therefore on strike.
Biden’s visit, like Trump’s, is “a publicity stunt,” says the single-parent mother of three, “always a month late” on paying her bills.
As a voter, she used to “tend to be a Democrat.” She would have voted for Robert F. Kennedy or Marianne Williamson, two candidates who have little or no chance of appearing on the ballot next November.
So who will get her vote in 2024?” “I do not know”.
