Why Trump Won’t Save the Rust Belt
Mr. Trump has his reasons for focusing on manufacturing, though. They don’t all have to do with economics. He ignores the fact that many of Michigan’s auto industry jobs were lost to automation, or to foreign manufacturers operating in the right-to-work South, because depicting the Chinese, Japanese and Mexicans as job-stealing alien villains better fits his America First narrative.
.. Mr. Riddle is skeptical of Mr. Trump’s promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States: “If other presidents couldn’t do it, how can he?”
.. He’s also ahead among voters ages 50 to 70, who came of age when a factory job was still a birthright, and share his nostalgia for those years.
.. Reagan Democrats — in 1980, they were 65 percent of the electorate, compared with 36 percent in 2012 — but Mr. Trump has tailored his politically incorrect alpha male persona and his protectionist message specifically to them.
.. As Lansing’s mayor, Virg Bernero, has noted, G.M. can build the same number of cars with 5,000 workers as it did with 25,000 in the 1950s and ’60s.
.. The Trump conundrum is that his campaign is about loss. His appeal is strongest among people who feel their social, economic and political influence slipping away, but he appeals to them specifically because their numbers are dwindling, thus making them less effective as an electoral coalition.