When Brenda Davis, a retired Ford worker in Ohio, discovered her new General Motors Buick was built entirely in China, it stung more than disappointment. It was a visual reminder of a threat that has haunted industrial towns for decades: jobs moving overseas.
For workers like Davis and Morgan Hughes, who still works at the GM plant in Springfield, Ohio, the pattern is familiar and demoralizing. The same voters who gave Donald Trump two presidential victories are now caught between broken promises and diminishing options. Democrats are gambling that frustration with tariffs, layoffs, and plant closures might swing them back.
A series of town halls organized by Public Citizen across Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa brought Democratic congressional representatives and labor leaders face-to-face with workers whose economic lives have been reshaped by trade policy. The effort targets voters who handed Trump victories in 2016 and 2024 by betting their futures on his manufacturing revival pitch.
The numbers tell a stark story. U.S. manufacturing employment peaked at roughly 19.6 million jobs in 1979, then entered a steady decline after the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994. By 2020, Trump's replacement trade deal with Mexico and Canada did little to reverse the trend. Today, there are about 12.6 million manufacturing jobs left, with the Department of Labor certifying that over 950,000 jobs were lost specifically due to Nafta, though researchers believe the true figure is substantially higher.
The Midwest bore the brunt of this shift. The region that once accounted for roughly one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs shed more than 1 million between 1990 and 2019. At Hughes's Springfield plant, the workforce collapsed from over 5,000 when her father started in the 1990s to about 1,300 today. Even after she began working there in 2012, the slide continued as production moved to Mexico.
Hughes worries the plant's recent sale signals deeper trouble ahead. Tariffs Trump has championed, she says, have choked orders to her facility. For workers in industrial towns, trade policy has become inescapable. "Tariffs and these trade agreements have just been our life," Hughes said.
Janice Williams worked 32 years at a Ford assembly plant before retiring in 2020. Her family's story stretches back through generations of Black coalminers in Kentucky. Offshoring didn't just cost her a job, she said, it fractured the possibility of passing down stable work to her children. "We're looking out for our families. We want our families, our children, to have the same opportunity we have had," Williams said. Yet the question haunting her now is blunt: "Where are the jobs going to be at?"
Gail Aleshire retired from the GM Lordstown plant before it closed in 2019. She counts herself extraordinarily fortunate to have a pension and healthcare in retirement. Many younger workers won't have that luxury. "I know that I'm very, very, very lucky," Aleshire said. "But there are so many people out there that don't have it and will never have it."
Trump's 2017 campaign rally in Youngstown promised workers to hold their ground: don't move, don't sell your house. Manufacturing jobs were coming back. Two years later, GM shuttered the Lordstown plant. David Green, who was local union president at the time, endured Trump's personal attack on social media. Green was no Trump loyalist, but plenty of his members were. What mattered most, Green realized, was that workers were desperate enough to believe.
"Who doesn't want someone to come in and save all the jobs?" Green asked. "The reality is the rhetoric was complete lies."
The promised recovery never arrived. Ultium Cells, a GM joint venture that opened at the Lordstown site, recently laid off more than 1,300 workers after Trump allowed electric vehicle tax credits to lapse. Green is now far more vocal about the stakes. "Elections have consequences," he said.
Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan is among the Democrats making the case against old trade deals. During a recent town hall in Dearborn, she called Nafta a "global race to the bottom" where "the gap between the rich and the poor skyrocketed and working people got shafted." Progressive Democrats and Trump agree on little, but both have blasted Nafta as catastrophic.
Some workers are skeptical Democrats can reclaim their loyalty. Meschelle Wilson, who has worked at a Ford truck plant in Dearborn since 2014, says the union needs to focus on issues that resonate with workers rather than partisan theater. Marjorie Chambers, who retired from GM in 2022, stressed that workers must understand the direct link between union power and the ballot box. "A house divided cannot stand," Chambers said, invoking Walter Reuther's call to connect the breadbox to political choice.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, offers a cautious assessment. Trump's approval rating on the economy stands at just 30 percent, Sabato noted, citing recent polling. If turnout is strong, Democrats will peel off some Republican voters simply through dissatisfaction. But Democrats have no immediate legislative leverage. "There's nothing they can offer because they control nothing," Sabato said. The party's immediate goal is convincing blue-collar voters that Trump isn't delivering for them. Real reclamation would require winning back power first.
The challenge is immense. Workers have lived through decades of hollow promises and empty rallies. They've watched plants close, towns collapse, and younger generations chase careers elsewhere. Trust, once lost, is exceedingly difficult to rebuild.
Author James Rodriguez: "Democrats are right to show up in factory towns, but nostalgia for a manufacturing era that tariffs and dealmaking alone cannot resurrect won't sway workers who have learned to expect broken promises from all sides."
Comments