Americana

Republicans know an auto strike is bad for Biden. They’re split on how to respond.

THE NEWS

As the United Automobile Workers’ strike entered its second week, and expanded to 20 states, Republicans were divided on how much support to show for the labor union, but united on who to blame.

“If you take a look at what they’re doing with electric cars, electric cars are going to be made in China,” Donald Trump said in a Sunday interview with NBC News.

Trump didn’t take a position on the strike itself; other candidates did. By Friday morning, the GOP field fit into one camp that was largely critical of the UAW and President Biden’s support for organized labor, and another, larger camp arguing that delivering for workers meant abandoning the administration’s push for electric vehicles.

Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Doug Burgum led with criticism of the unions. In an interview with Fox News, Haley disparaged the union’s demand for 40% pay raises, and called the strike a consequence of Biden “constantly saying, ‘go union, go union,’” creating more “emboldened” organizers.

At a town hall in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Scott said that Biden had been “leased” by the unions, and suggested that Ronald Reagan provided a “great example” of leadership when he fired striking air traffic controllers; he elaborated in a statement on Friday, calling EVs “bad for workers” while accusing the “corrupt” UAW of demanding a “massive pay raise for a French-style work week.” And in an interview with NPR, Burgum said that non-union car manufacturers were showing the way forward.

“You can look all over America at new auto plants where there are non-union workers,” Burgum told NPR on Wednesday. “They’re happy. They’ve got great work. They’ve got great benefits. They love their communities.”

That response frustrated conservative populists, who see this as a moment for Biden’s challengers to articulate what they’d do for workers — not, like Haley, how much they want to beat organized labor.

“It really underscores the extent to which there just is no useful thinking about these issues on the old right,” said Oren Cass, the executive director of American Compass, who called the anti-labor reactions “zombie Reaganism.”

The Biden campaign also saw it as a liability for Republicans, quickly stitching together a video of Haley and Scott denouncing the president’s pro-union stances and jokingly presenting it as an endorsement.

Other Republicans, like Trump, reserved their blame for the Inflation Reduction Act and the Biden administration’s support for electric cars; its goal, which conservatives call impossible, is that half of all new cars sold by 2030 will be electric. But unions have eyed EVs warily, in part because they require significantly less labor to produce, and many of their key parts, such as batteries, are still dominated by foreign makers, particularly from China. Attacks focused on its green policies have clearly made the White House more nervous.

In Iowa, Ron DeSantis called “Biden’s push to impose electric vehicle mandates” the biggest threat to workers, and his energy plan promises to “save the American automobile” by repealing EV subsidies; on CNBC, Pence called the Biden agenda “good for Beijing and bad for Detroit.”

When Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg came to the House this week, Republicans stuck to that theme, with Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry warning that “the administration’s subsidization of the electric vehicles is killing their jobs,” and Michigan Rep. John James warning that the president would be “literally taking money away from UAW workers” in the long run.

“When companies are doing well, their workers should benefit, too – that’s why we have unions in this country,” Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance told Axios at a Wednesday newsmakers forum. “The way that climate policy has manifested itself in the auto industry is really, really bad for a lot of these workers.”

DAVID’S VIEW

The GOP primary isn’t going to determine how the UAW’s limited strike ends, but Trump’s strategy — including a plan to rally in Detroit next week — has helped most Republicans figure out their response. A few stragglers are criticizing the union for demanding too much, but most are positioning themselves as defenders of manufacturing jobs against a green agenda. In Trump’s case he’s argued the UAW is “being sold down the river by their leadership” who are too afraid to take on Biden’s policies.

Democrats aren’t hiding their angst about this. They’ve been deliberating over sending Biden to the picket lines all week, which party figures like Hakeem Jeffries, Bernie Sanders, and John Fetterman have already visited. On Friday morning, UAW President Shawn Fain urged Biden to join them.

“For a very long time, progressives have gotten away with claiming that there’s a win-win here,” said Cass. “They say: Look at all the green jobs our policies create! The reality is that those are gross jobs, not net jobs. They get you only part-way out of the hole created by their policies.”

It’s a reliable strategy, pitting the Democratic party’s environmentalists, who want to leave carbon in the ground, against its working class allies. After some blue states required future homes to use electric stoves, DeSantis hit back with a tax cut for gas stoves — a largely political statement in a state where most people don’t use them. At campaign stops in Iowa last week, Haley suggested that the Biden administration wanted “everyone” to be driving electric cars by 2030, vastly over-stating its goals.

“One of the things that we really need to do is not become dependent on China for electric vehicles,” Haley said at a roundtable in Indianola. The Biden administration’s goal is an EV industry that doesn’t rely on Chinese manufacturing; the Republican response is that it’ll prop up a China-dominated industry for years before that happens, and it probably won’t.

“I don’t even really blame the workers, even though I think the union bosses are channeling this in the wrong direction,” Vivek Ramaswamy said on CNBC this week. “Who they really should be striking against is President Biden.”

THE VIEW FROM SHAWN FAIN

One irony, for Haley in particular, is that the right-to-work South has been getting the majority of electric vehicle investments since 2021. That’s the UAW’s chief concern — that a jump to EVs will create more non-union jobs, in an industry already dominated by proudly non-union Tesla.

During interviews, Fain has stressed that he doesn’t oppose the industry’s move to electrification — “anyone that doesn’t believe global warming is happening isn’t paying attention,” he told CBS — but that it needs to be a “just transition.” In contract talks, the union has pushed to tuck battery plant workers into union’s national wage agreement.

“The switch to electric engine jobs, battery production and other EV manufacturing cannot become a race to the bottom,” Fain said in June, after Ford got a $9.2 billion federal loan to build battery factories in Kentucky and Tennessee. “Not only is the federal government not using its power to turn the tide – they’re actively funding the race to the bottom with billions in public money.”

As for Trump? Fain has said it would be a “disaster” if the former president returned to office, even though he’s so far declined to endorse Biden for re-election. “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers,” he said in a statement this week. “We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck.”

THE VIEW FROM DEMOCRATS

Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell said that Trump’s planned rally for workers was a distraction, and what mattered was getting the parties back to the table — something the White House can’t just demand.

“Trump is making a very, very big mistake in his talking points, when he talks about these cars being 100% Chinese,” said Dingell. “We’re in a competitive marketplace. These cars are 50% of sales in some parts of the world. They’re going to be built. I’m fighting so that we get them built by American auto workers with good paying union jobs. That’s why these negotiations are so important. It’s not a talking point moment.”

NOTABLE

• In Politico, Olivia Olander, Nick Niedzwiadek, and Doug Palmer dig into Trump’s history with labor unions: “When the UAW waged a six-week strike against GM in 2019, Trump mostly stayed silent.”
• In Jacobin, Dianne Feeley says that a victorious UAW strike could organize the emerging EV industry: “If the contract rolls back concessions, battery workers will flock to the UAW.”

New Hampshire. Democrats flipped a state House seat in a Tuesday special election, winnowing the GOP majority to one seat in a 400-member legislature. Hal Rafter, a former school board member, defeated GOP nominee Jim Guzofski by 12 points in a section of Rockingham County that voted for Donald Trump by a fraction of a percentage point. It’s the latest Democratic over-performance in a special election this year; NH Journal’s Michael Graham suggests that Guzofski ran a vax-skeptical campaign that was a poor fit for the district.

New Jersey. Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez was indicted on Friday morning, along with his wife, after a long-running FBI probe into whether he’d taken bribes to deliver political favors. He is accused of hoarding “over $480,000 in cash—much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe,” as well as of accepting “gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value.” Assuming he does not resign, this is the second time that Menendez, who is up for reelection next year, will find himself campaigning under the cloud of a corruption scandal.

The senator held onto his seat in 2018 after beating back another set of charges; he romped over a fringe primary challenger by just 24 points, and national Democrats spent millions to defend him in the general election. New Jersey Democrats have a deep bench of potential Senate candidates this time, including Reps. Mikie Sherrill, Andy Kim, Josh Gottheimmer, and former Rep. Tom Malinowski, though none have moved against Menendez, and a Democratic mayor who’d been challenging him this year recently switched to run for Congress. But Menendez said on Friday that he’d beat the charges, which targeted a “first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings.”

Andy Beshear for Governor, “Unthinkable.” Kentucky’s Democratic governor has pounded Attorney Gen. Daniel Cameron for months over his defense of the state’s abortion ban, which doesn’t include exemptions for rape and incest. This ad puts a face and voice to the policy: Hadley Duvall, a woman who recounts her childhood rape and says that Cameron could “never understand what it’s like to stand in my shoes.” Cameron has started to hit back, saying this week that he could sign an exemptions bill if he beats Beshear, and releasing a video to condemn the ad that tous his new support for a carve-out. Asked in Wednesday’s debate with Beshear to say something nice about his opponent, Cameron said he might have — before this ad ran.

American Principles Project PAC, “Protect Women.” In 2019, the APP’s PAC ran ads warning that Beshear would “destroy girl’s sports” by allowing trans women, who’d gone through male puberty, to play against them. In March, Beshear vetoed a Republican package of transgender restrictions, including a sports ban. That was built for general election ads, like this one, in which ex-University of Pennsylvania Riley Gaines calls Beshear a “trans activist” and attacks the veto, urging voters to “protect women” by voting for Cameron.

In January, when Republican donors were pleading with Ron DeSantis to run for president, the University of New Hampshire poll showed him leading Donald Trump in the first primary state — a 42-30 advantage in a place where Trump-endorsed candidates had just been swept by Democrats. DeSantis’ support has collapsed since then, with moderates leading the evacuation. In January, 55% of moderates backed DeSantis; that fell to 26% in July, and 6% now, while 46% of moderates say they have an “unfavorable” view of the Florida governor. Trump gets 57% of self-identified conservatives, and no alternative has emerged, yet, as the choice of moderates: Haley gets 24% of that vote, Christie gets 22%, and Trump gets 23%.

Public polling is matching up with the Trump campaign’s internals: A 3-1 lead over Ron DeSantis, and Haley in the hunt for second place. Iowa’s GOP electorate is more conservative than New Hampshire’s, but DeSantis has run into the same problem in both states: Voters aren’t hyper-focused on abortion, COVID rules, or gender identity, topics that DeSantis has hammered for an advantage over Trump. Just 13% of Iowa Republicans list “social issues” as their top voting concern.

The Human Rights Campaign’s PAC is all in for former HRC press secretary Sarah McBride, the first transgender woman ever elected to a state senate, and the fundraising leader in the race for Delaware’s open House seat. This poll, paid for by the PAC, finds McBride with the advantage in a highly-educated Democratic primary electorate — just 15% of likely voters have a high school education or less. Young has name ID from his previous run for mayor of Wilmington, and Davis won last year’s state treasurer race by 8 points, but McBride starts a long, long primary (Sep. 10, 2024) with the advantage.

White House. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis rolled out new economic plans this week, both of them including rollbacks of the Biden administration’s environmental agenda. In Texas, DeSantis pledged to pull America out of the Paris Climate Accords and all “Net Zero” commitments, open more land to drilling and mining, and repeal Biden’s electric vehicle subsidies. In New Hampshire, Haley debuted a “Freedom Plan” that included the elimination of the federal gas tax and the repeal of the subsidies, plus more reforms to restructure government — like five-year term limits for federal employees and congressional up-or-down votes on all new regulations.

Reince Priebus chaired the Republican National Committee for six years, guiding it through the disappointing 2012 election, the triumphant 2014 midterms, and the 2016 upset victory of Donald Trump, who made him his first White House chief of staff. Priebus remade the RNC’s political and fundraising infrastructure, and he changed the way that the party handled presidential debates, setting rules for candidates and media partners to prevent a sprawling, distracting schedule that did lasting damage ahead of the general election.

Next week, at least six Republican candidates will meet for the second 2024 primary debate, in southern California. Donald Trump won’t join them, and has signaled that he’ll skip the third debate, set for Miami in mid-October. Did debate reform pay off? We talked about it.

Americana: In 2013, Republicans wanted to end the “circular firing squad” they saw in the 2012 primary. Have the changes to these debates fixed that?

Reince Priebus: The main thing that we accomplished back in 2015, the long-lasting thing, was putting the party back in charge of the debates. The party is still running the show, as far as the debates are concerned, and I think that’s a positive. Having conservative voices in the debates as moderators is important, too, and that’s going to continue.

David Weigel: What sort of damage did those 2012 debates do to the candidates? Can you remember something messy that stuck to Romney in the election?

Reince Priebus: Not off the top of my head, but I just think that the dynamics in 2023 are so different than in 2011. Who can win a general election, back in 2011, had a lot more play with the base than it does in 2023. Romney’s advantage was his argument about electability, which propelled him. I think the base of the Republican Party is far more interested today in a pure values consideration, as opposed to “who do I think is most likely to win in November?” Quite frankly, I think any one of our candidates can beat Joe Biden, but that focus has changed.

Americana: One other problem the party identified in 2012 was the sheer number of debates; I remember one weekend in New Hampshire where the candidates debated at night then came back for a debate the next morning. Has that been fixed?

Reince Priebus: Yeah, we cut it down. We put the party in charge. The basic concept of being elected as the nominee of our party is that the party is in control of the process. The candidates don’t control the party, and if the candidates don’t like the process, they can run with a different party. It’s a private political organization in charge of its own nomination process.

A long time ago, there were no statewide primary elections — the delegates and members of the party picked the nominee, and the nominee ran for office. The party decided, many years ago, to include the voices of non-members to help choose the nominees. But that’s merely a directive to a bunch of delegates at a convention to make the choice.

Americana: How did Bret Baier and Martha McCallum do in Milwaukee?

Reince Priebus: I think they did a great job. They’re two of the best in the entire business. But there should be an opportunity to try and draw out some contrast between the candidates, when there’s such a limited amount of time, and there’s one debate a month — at least for the rest of this year. The moderators should try to draw those contrasts out a little bit more. But the candidates have an opportunity to do that themselves, and they didn’t do a whole lot of that in Milwaukee, with a couple of exceptions.

Americana: What contrasts between the candidates stuck out, for you?

Reince Priebus: There were important contrasts on Ukraine, on how we talk about abortion, some contrast on what’s been happening with President Trump. But essentially, aside from some small differences, most of the candidates agree with each other. Their minor disagreements don’t move huge swaths of the party. The one thing that does is how you feel about President Trump. And most candidates played it safe there.

Americana: Did any of the candidates do themselves a lot of good — anyone in particular?

Reince Priebus: Look, the couple of governors that barely made the debate stage didn’t get a whole lot of time or a whole lot of play. I don’t think that they had as good of an opportunity to get their message out. But I did not see someone take votes and percentages away from Donald Trump. I mean, the whole point of this is that you have the former president with a 40- to 50-point lead. What part of that lead did someone else take? And I don’t think there was any dent made in that calculation.

Americana: Should CNN or NBC get to host one of these debates?

Reince Priebus: Yeah, I think that the love should be spread around, with rules, and with conservative partners when necessary. Maybe some online operations, too. I think that as many people in the world should see that a lot of competent people are running for president and the Republican Party.

Americana: Is Trump ever going to do one of these?

Reince Priebus: I think he will. He’ll do one or two of them, and it’ll be built up, and the hype will be off the charts, and he’ll get a lot of publicity out of it. I think he should have done the Milwaukee debate. There’s no downside. He probably would have had half of all the speaking time because he would have been involved nonstop. And the ratings probably would have been off the charts. Trump probably made the right decision not to debate, but I wished he had debated.

• five days until the second GOP presidential debate
• 22 days until elections in Louisiana
• 36 days until elections in Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Virginia
• 135 days until the Iowa caucuses
• 410 days until the 2024 presidential election

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