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MEET THE UNITED AUTO WORKERS MEMBERS WHO COULD SWING THE ELECTION

At Ford’s Michigan Assembly auto plant, support is divided between strong camps
of Trump enthusiasts, Harris devotees and undecided voters.

10 min
151

A Ford Bronco at the company’s assembly plant in Wayne, Mich., on June 14, 2021.
(Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
By Lauren Kaori Gurley
September 27, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

WAYNE, MICH. — On his 10-hour shifts installing brake lines on Ford SUVs and
trucks, United Auto Workers member Andrew Hudson listens to news and political
commentary on his AirPods, from liberal MSNBC to conservative podcaster Joe
Rogan. He admires former president Donald Trump’s “forceful” leadership style,
though said he can be “full of crap.” And he wants to like Vice President Kamala
Harris, but he said he doesn’t get a clear sense of where she stands on key
issues, such as the economy and inflation.



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“I am really so undecided,” Hudson said in an interview with The Washington Post
over garlic knots this week. “If you want to see someone who is in the middle,
that is me.”

Ford’s Michigan Assembly plant just outside Detroit has emerged as a
battleground in the 2024 presidential campaign, where workers — like the state
itself — are up for grabs.

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That’s a big reason Trump is headed to the area on Friday, to court autoworkers
at a community college near Detroit. Harris visited Michigan Assembly last
month.

In the midst of all of the attention, workers at the factory, which makes
Broncos and Rangers, are divided among camps of Trump enthusiasts, Harris
devotees and undecided voters, workers say. The factory floor hums with
political talk, which has remained cordial.

Of 25 UAW members The Post informally polled during a shift change this week,
nine said they were supporting or leaning toward Trump, and seven said they were
supporting or leaning toward Harris. Eight said they were undecided, not voting
or unwilling to share. The Post also sat down for more extensive interviews with
other workers from the plant.



Hudson, 48, a third-generation African American autoworker, said voting
Democratic “was all I ever knew” since childhood. But his sister supported Trump
in 2016, and Hudson took a second look.

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“I became more of an independent,” Hudson said. “You know what you’re getting
with Trump, but I want to hear more about what Harris is going to do for the
American people. When I listen to her lately, I think she be spinning word
salad.”

These workers are at the heart of the Democratic Party’s challenge to hold on to
traditional union votes in November. While many still lean Democratic, more
union members have shifted right in recent years, wooed by Trump’s appeals to
restore manufacturing jobs and impose tariffs on imports. And many are clustered
in the Rust Belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,
where union members make up at least 20 percent of the electorate, according to
the AFL-CIO.

The Michigan Assembly plant was thrust into the spotlight last fall, when UAW
President Shawn Fain called upon workers to be among the first to walk off the
job in a rolling strike that would eventually force the Big 3 automakers to
concede the largest pay raises in decades. And President Joe Biden became the
first sitting president to walk a picket line, joining UAW workers last year at
a separate Michigan auto plant.

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Most major American unions, including the UAW, have endorsed Harris, pronouncing
Trump a threat to organized labor and the working-class. But a number of
rank-and-file union members say they are troubled by inflation and the prospect
of plant closures, and remain politically uncertain.

Some UAW members from Michigan Assembly said they planned to attend the Trump
event on Friday, where the former president is expected to talk about his agenda
for “rebuilding the auto industry,” according to his campaign website. Misti
Robinette, a Ford employee for 25 years, will be there.



Robinette, 50, said she voted Democratic her whole life and initially found
Trump offensive toward women, until her 22-year-old son persuaded her to read up
on him. Now she supports his efforts to crack down on undocumented immigration
and leave abortion restrictions up to the states, as well as his record as a
businessman.

“I’m so stinking excited,” Robinette said of the Trump event. “I’m probably
going to cry.” She was also thrilled to hear his recent proposal to end taxes on
overtime pay, because she frequently works more than 40 hours a week on the
overnight shift.



The UAW says that its internal polling over the years has shown that most of its
members support Democratic candidates and that it feels confident a majority
will also support Harris in November. In August, the union launched an “all out”
field and digital campaign to mobilize membership, including door-knocking
across 11 Michigan counties as well as phone banks and work conversations.

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Victoria LaCivita, a spokesperson for Trump’s Michigan campaign, told The Post:
“If Kamala Harris is elected president, Michigan will lose 37,000 jobs in the
auto industry due to her radical policies.” She added that Trump will stop
Harris’s “disastrous Green New Deal policies and her administration’s war on
energy, which contributed to the inflation mess we’ve found ourselves in.”

In a statement about Trump’s Friday visit with Michigan autoworkers, Harris
called him “one of the biggest losers of manufacturing in American history.” “As
President, he cut taxes for corporations, encouraged outsourcing, and lost
nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs, including auto jobs,” Harris said.

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The Ford shop floor has become ground zero for election talk, although nobody is
fighting on the floor, workers said. Many workers turn on political videos and
podcasts on their earbuds on shifts that can run 12 hours. And in recent days, a
group known as “Autoworkers for Trump” has rallied outside the factory gates.

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While workers at the Michigan Assembly plant are a noticeable mix of Black,
White, Arab American and Hispanic workers, political support doesn’t fall neatly
down racial, or even gender lines, according to The Post’s interviews and more
extended conversations with union leaders.

“Trump will take our rights away,” said an African American Harris supporter,
who had stopped by the nearby UAW Local 900 union hall to drop off paperwork,
adding that she had two daughters and abortion rights are her top issue.

“Trump! Trump! Trump! UAW for Trump!” a White man in a Ford pick-up truck
leaving his shift yelled, before hitting the gas pedal.



Charles Wade, 47, a union representative at Michigan Assembly who started at the
Ford plant at 22, said he was supporting Harris because she’s more in touch with
“what the world is actually like.”

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“She might have a lot of money now … but she’s not a billionaire and she ain’t
been rich her whole life,” Wade said.

Kevin Ewald, a 29-year Ford employee and Desert Storm veteran, said he voted for
Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton in 2016, but would be voting for Trump
for the second time this year.

Ewald said he appreciates Trump’s policies and his way of speaking to voters:
“You actually know what he’s talking about.” He added that he’s deeply concerned
by the Democratic Party’s process for selecting Harris: “I actually don’t
understand how anybody could be a Democrat right now the way they did the whole
primary thing,” he said.

As the election nears, Trump and Harris have been doubling down on their pursuit
of union voters like those at Michigan Assembly, often with sharply contrasting
messaging. Harris has trumpeted the Biden administration’s labor achievements,
such as investing in union manufacturing jobs including clean energy. Unions
have said one of the administration’s most trailblazing wins has been appointing
a staunchly pro-labor leader at the National Labor Relations Board who has made
it easier for Americans to unionize, even as unions are losing their share of
the U.S. workforce.



Trump has vowed to protect American workers by raising tariffs on imports into
the United States, re-shoring manufacturing jobs and sealing the border off from
undocumented immigrants. He’s called the current administration’s investments in
electric vehicle production “a transition to hell” that will kill auto jobs.

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Still, as president, Trump supported a labor agenda that severely restricted
union power, including installing pro-business NLRB appointees whose policies
made it harder for workers to join unions. He recently joked in a live-streamed
conversation with Elon Musk about firing striking workers — a comment that
earned him the ire of union leaders, including UAW’s Fain.

The fiery UAW chief has been an outspoken critic of Trump. During the Democratic
National Convention last month, Fain unveiled a T-shirt under his blazer during
his prime-time address that said: “Trump is a scab.”

Tiffanie Simmons, 39, a third-generation autoworker who also oversees nearly 200
Michigan Assembly workers as a union representative, told The Post that Harris
is an obvious pick because she’s “the labor-friendly candidate.”

But Simmons is attuned to the fact that not all of her fellow UAW members feel
motivated to vote for labor’s favored candidate, especially those who are less
active in the union and have watched auto jobs deteriorate since their parents’
generation.



“Trump projects confidence, and that’s something that people want to see in
themselves,” Simmons said. “They think he’s going to swoop in and save the day
for us. But when you ask them what’s he going to do to save our a----, they
can’t tell me.”

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Recently, UAW members who work at Ford have seen their income jump with top pay
for UAW autoworkers rising from $32 an hour to more than $40 an hour over the
four-year contract. But some UAW members say the victories under Fain’s
leadership do not hold much weight in determining the votes of autoworkers
already committed to Trump.

“Everybody was happy with what Fain was doing” because of the raises, said Wade,
the other union representative at Michigan Assembly. But those who support Trump
felt Fain turned on them by endorsing Harris, he said, adding that “now they’re
against [Fain].”

Dressed in a Detroit Lions hoodie and sweatpants, Wade told The Post over $17
Cajun steak bites at a UAW-favored watering hole down the road from the plant
that the wage gains had noticeably improved workers’ lives, but the bump did not
fundamentally shift their politics or solve the pain of inflation, he said.

“The wage increases make people go, ‘Oooh, I can buy name-brand groceries. I can
afford my gas and my bills and to take my kids out to eat once a week,’” he
said. “But they’re like, ‘Dang, if I got three kids, I still can’t go on
vacation because I’m struggling.’”


ELECTION 2024

Follow live updates on the 2024 election and the contest between Vice President
Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump from our reporters on the
campaign trail and in Washington.

Potential assassination attempt: Trump was unharmed in what authorities are
investigating as another potential assassination attempt, after a man pointed a
rifle into a Florida golf course where the former president was playing. Police
arrested Ryan Wesley Routh, a 58-year-old man who spent recent years trying to
join the war in Ukraine, according to online posts and law enforcement
officials.

Policy positions: We’ve collected Harris’s and Trump’s stances on the most
important issues — abortion, economic policy, immigration and more.

Presidential polls: Check out how Harris and Trump stack up, according to The
Washington Post’s presidential polling averages of seven battleground states.
We’ve identified eight possible paths to victory based on the candidates’
current standing in the polls.

Senate control: Senate Democrats are at risk of losing their slim 51-49 majority
this fall. The Post breaks down the eight races and three long shots that could
determine Senate control.

Show more

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