2023-09-27 21:20:44
How do we vote when we make cars we can’t afford? In Detroit, it will be tough, the battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden for the vote of workers and the popular white electorate.
“Buying a new car would be half my annual salary,” asserts Curtis Cranford.
This 66-year-old worker has just shaken hands with the American president, who briefly joined a strike picket on Tuesday, in front of a General Motors factory in Belleville, in the great suburbs of Detroit (Michigan, northeast).
He thanked Joe Biden for coming, but because of the energy transition which “will cost jobs”, and especially because of Democratic positions on abortion and immigration, he “will probably vote Republican” next year.
And therefore potentially for Donald Trump, the big favorite in the Conservative Party primary.
Skipping the debate of the other contenders for the Republican candidacy, the former president went Wednesday to a small automobile factory near Detroit.
He has accused Joe Biden several times of putting in place an “obligation” to buy electric cars, even if the Democratic president has not revealed any plans in this direction.
It would be “an assassination of your jobs”, he told his audience.
“I will always be there for you,” also promised the Republican billionaire, from this industrial site which is not, unlike the factory in front of which his opponent visited the day before, affiliated with the UAW union.
The latter launched a historic strike against the three major American manufacturers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump are fighting to “seduce the working electorate, especially white”, which will be decisive next year, analyzes Jefferson Cowie, professor at Vanderbildt University, in an interview with NPR radio.
“Will they be seduced by Trump’s usual rhetoric, particularly around race and nationalism? Or will we see a movement more oriented towards (…) Biden’s somewhat Rooseveltian vision, that’s really the central question “, he summarizes.
Joe Biden, who relies heavily on the support of unions, is the first American president to ever join a picket line.
Carolyn Nippa, 51, including 26 years working for GM, still can’t believe she greeted him: “It was surreal.”
“Cooked”
“I’m not for Trump. I’m saying it bluntly. I think he worked for multinationals and billionaires,” she says.
Pam, 72, thinks on the contrary that her salvation will come from Donald Trump.
“The cost of living has increased so much and all because of these electric cars and this crappy ‘Green New Deal’,” said this retired hairdresser, who did not wish to give her last name, in waiting to cheer the former president.
Not far away, Gerry Henley, a 33-year-old machinist, says: “I look at my pay slip and I wonder: where did my money go? They just send it to Ukraine.”
Electric cars, very little for him: “I will drive on gasoline until I die”.
So, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, who is the champion of workers?
“It’s hard to say,” breathes Kristy Zometsky, 44, one of the strikers greeted by Joe Biden on Tuesday.
“This strike is not really a political affair,” she assures, at the gates of the factory where her father and uncle also worked.
Like all the UAW strikers met this week, she prefers to talk about the sacrifices made in 2009 to bail out multinationals.
It was following this economic and financial crisis that Sarah Polk asked herself: “But who really supports us?”
This 53-year-old graphic designer, met in the center of Detroit, is not an automobile worker, but, as an employee of the insurer Blue Cross, is nonetheless unionized with the UAW.
The arrival of Biden, like Trump, “is a communications operation”, says this mother of three children, whom she takes care of alone, “always a month late” in paying her bills.
As a voter, before, she “was more of a Democrat”. And now? “I don’t know”
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