Vice President Kamala Harris was in battleground Michigan on Monday, where she met with workers at a semiconductor factory and union training facility and slammed her GOP opponent, former President Donald Trump’s record on domestic manufacturing and support for labor.
“He’s not working for or concerned about working people, middle-class people,” Harris said of Trump during her second stop of the day in Macomb County.
The vice president specifically criticized Trump for filling the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that enforces labor laws in the United States, with anti-union figures as well as for lauding ally Elon Musk, the businessman and owner of the social media platform X, for discussing firing striking workers.
Before her stop in Warren, where she toured an International Union of Painters and Allied Trades training facility, the vice president kicked off the day with a visit to Corning Incorporated’s Hemlock semiconductor facility in Saginaw County.
“My opponent spends full time talking about, just kind of diminishing who we are as America and talking down at people,” she said from the facility Monday afternoon.
Harris specifically criticized Trump for bashing one of the Biden administration’s signature pieces of legislation, the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which is directing billions in federal dollars to projects around the country to promote domestic semiconductor manufacturing and bring jobs in the industry back to the U.S. from overseas. A number of companies, like Micron and Samsung, have announced major U.S. semiconductor facilities in the wake of the law being enacted two years ago.
Last week, the Biden-Harris administration said it is providing up to $325 million to the company Harris visited on Monday to build a new hyper-pure polysilicon factory that would bring 180 jobs to the Rust Belt swing state.
“Just recently did a radio talk show and talked about how he’d get rid of the CHIPS Act,” Harris said of Trump. “That was billions of dollars investing in just the kind of work that’s happening here. And you know how we did it? We created tax credits to create the incentive for the private sector to do this work.”
Speaking on the popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” on Friday, the former president was critical that funding has gone to foreign companies to open factories in the U.S. and said he would prefer to increase tariffs on computer chips made overseas as a way to incentive domestic manufacturing instead.
“We put up billions of dollars for rich companies to come in and borrow the money and build chip companies here, and they’re not going to give us the good companies anyway,” Trump said on the show.
During her stop on Monday – in which she received a tour of the Hemlock semiconductor facility – Harris also reiterated her pledge to revisit college degree requirements for certain jobs in the federal government and encourage the private sector to do the same.
Harris was set to host a rally in Ann Arbor later Monrday with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, with recording artist Maggie Rogers scheduled to perform as part of the campaign’s "When We Vote We Win" concert series.
Trump holds an edge on the economy, according to most polls, but a New York Times/Siena College poll published last week shows Harris has cut her GOP opponent’s 13-point edge on the ultra-salient issue in half a month’s time. An ABC News poll out Sunday has Harris ahead of Trump on looking out for the middle class.
Spectrum News' Cassie Semyon and the Associated Press contributed to this report.