Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday sought to rebut a frequent argument from former President Donald J. Trump that she would mandate the end of gasoline-powered cars, issuing a rare direct response to her White House rival’s exaggerations and misleading claims.
Speaking at a rally in Flint, a mid-Michigan city whose onetime cadre of thriving auto factories never recovered from closures in the 1980s, Ms. Harris tried to reassure voters in the state, who are being bombarded by Trump ads that claim she “wants to end all gas-powered cars.”
“Michigan, let us be clear,” she said. “Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive. But here’s what I will do. I will invest in communities like Flint.”
The politics of the nation’s slow march toward more electric vehicles have been tricky in Michigan, a battleground state that is home to the nation’s three major automakers. As the climate crisis has worsened, President Biden’s administration has required emissions standards that will most likely require about half of the new cars sold in the United States to emit zero emissions by 2032.
To reach that goal, the Biden administration has offered incentives to manufacturers who produce electric vehicles and tax credits for consumers who buy them.
But the batteries that power electric vehicles require fewer workers to construct them than the gas-powered engines that have long been the heartbeat of Michigan’s auto industry. That has led Mr. Trump and other Republicans, whose campaigns are funded in part by oil and gas company executives, to warn of mass job losses for auto workers if the nation transitions to more electric vehicles.
Ms. Harris on Friday emphasized the Biden administration’s work to bolster Michigan’s auto manufacturing industry. She also attacked Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, over Mr. Vance’s refusal on Wednesday to say their administration would maintain a $500 million federal grant Mr. Biden made to a General Motors factory in Lansing, which is about an hour from Flint.
“Michigan, we together fought hard for those jobs, and you deserve a president who won’t put them at risk,” Ms. Harris said.
Her visit to Michigan was part of her campaign’s aggressive pitch to secure the Northern battleground states by pitching herself as the candidate for the working and middle classes.
Earlier on Friday, Ms. Harris stumped at a firehouse in Redford Township, a Detroit suburb, where she highlighted her support for unions and contrasted it with Mr. Trump, whom she called one of the “biggest losers” of manufacturing jobs in American history.
“I will always put the middle class and working families first,” she said. “I come from the middle class, and I will never forget where I came from.”
The rally was Ms. Harris’s fourth trip to Michigan since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. It was her first to Flint, a predominantly Black city of about 80,000 people that was thrust into the national spotlight a decade ago when its drinking water was found to be contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.
“You know all too well, Flint, that clean water should be a right for everyone, not just for the people who can afford it,” Ms. Harris told the audience packed into the city’s hockey arena.
Flint has also long been reliant on its General Motors auto factories. The left-wing movie producer Michael Moore’s first hit documentary, “Roger and Me,” focused on damage done to the city after the company closed several factories in the 1980s.
Among the liberal allies joining Ms. Harris in Flint were Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan; Shawn Fain, the president of the powerful United Auto Workers union; and Magic Johnson, the basketball star-turned-entrepreneur who grew up in Lansing and led Michigan State University to a national championship. Mr. Johnson’s father, who died last year, worked at an Oldsmobile factory and had a garbage-hauling business.
Mr. Johnson extolled Ms. Harris’s commitment to union workers and also confronted one of her campaign’s acute challenges: a struggle to match Mr. Biden’s popularity with Black men.
“Our Black men, we’ve got to get them out to vote,” Mr. Johnson said. Mr. Trump, he added, “promised a lot of things last time to the Black community that he didn’t deliver on.”
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