Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks as she visits Hemlock Semiconductor in Hemlock, Michigan, during a campaign trip, Oct. 28, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Vice President Kamala Harris put manufacturing at the center of her closing message against former President Donald Trump in the battleground state of Michigan on Monday.
“When he was president, he sold advanced chips to China that helped them with their agenda to modernize their military,” Harris said of her Republican opponent during a speech at the Hemlock Semiconductor manufacturing center in Saginaw County.
“That’s not about what’s in the best interest of America’s security and prosperity, which should be two of the highest priorities for president in the United States,” she added.
Just over a week before the Nov. 5 election, Harris’ manufacturing-focused visit was one of her final opportunities to cut into Trump’s polling edge on the economy in a state that has become an epicenter of nascent U.S. industries such as semiconductors and electric vehicles.
Ahead of her remarks, the Democratic presidential nominee toured the Hemlock Semiconductor facility, which recently received a $325 million investment from the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act.
“Billions of dollars investing in just the kind of work that’s happening here,” Harris said, touting the CHIPS Act, which Trump has criticized. “We created tax credits to create the incentive for private sector to do this work.”
CNBC’s October All-America Economic Survey found 46% of respondents nationally said Trump would be better for the economy in their community versus 38% who said the same of Harris. That difference is outside the poll’s margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
In battleground states specifically, the poll found that Trump maintained a comparable 8-point edge, also outside the margin of error of 4.0 percentage points.
The Michigan tour is part of the Harris campaign’s weeklong barnstorming of the battleground states. On Sunday, the vice president was in Pennsylvania, and she is scheduled to visit North Carolina, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada on Wednesday and Thursday.
Following her Hemlock Semiconductor speech, Harris is set to tour a labor union training facility. She will then head to Ann Arbor for a rally with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Harris and Trump have each promised a manufacturing boom under their hypothetical administrations with differing ideas on how to make that happen.
Trump has pledged to repeal the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and has attacked the CHIPS Act. The Republican presidential nominee has floated a universal tariff policy on all imports as his primary strategy to onshore manufacturing industries.
“That chip deal is so bad,” Trump said in a Friday interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. “All you had to do is charge them tariffs.”
Harris has slammed that hardline tariff approach, branding it a “Trump sales tax,” because of economists’ estimates that an across-the-board import tax would raise consumer prices.
For her part, Harris wants to boost manufacturing through a combination of tax credits and government subsidies for sectors such as artificial intelligence, clean energy manufacturing, autos and semiconductors.