Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks during a visit to the General Motors Factory ZERO electric-vehicle assembly plant, November 17, 2021, in Detroit.
Like a number of other commentators, I’ve argued that President Biden needs to do a lot more than tout his economic achievements, considerable though they’ve been, if he’s going to defeat Donald Trump and preserve American democracy come November.
That said, polling released today by American Compass, an organization that’s become the pro-union unicorn in the Republicans’ union-hating herd, makes the case, however unintentionally, that there’s at least one Biden economic achievement that he should shout from the housetops: the revival of American manufacturing.
The poll, conducted by YouGov, found that the support that Wall Street and every president, both Republican and Democratic, from Reagan through Obama, gave to actually existing globalization has virtually no support among actually existing people. Only 3 percent of poll respondents agreed that “the goal should be producing things where it can be done at the lowest cost,” which has long been a tenet of economic orthodoxy, and which was indeed the goal of such trade accords as NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China. Only 2 percent agreed that government should be guided by the belief that “manufacturing was the old economy; we need new economy jobs,” which was a refrain of post–New Deal Democrats dating back at least to Gary Hart.
The public’s rejection of offshoring our industrial base was doubtless intensified by the supply chain vulnerabilities exposed by the COVID pandemic. But the poll also showed widespread awareness that whole regions of our country have been left behind in the shift to a postindustrial economy, and that the government should prioritize their economic revival. Asked whether the government should help Americans in those regions move to areas with greater economic opportunity (as Trump once suggested for the residents of upstate New York) or help those regions recover, 70 percent support the latter. Overwhelmingly, respondents said that creating a stronger domestic manufacturing sector was necessary, for reasons of national security, the viability of the nation’s economy, for the good jobs it would (presumably) create, or some or all of the above.
Which brings us back to Biden and Trump. Both talk the talk about reshoring industry and revitalizing the sector, but only Biden has walked the walk. By virtue of the tax credits for factories that will build electric vehicles and other components of a green economy, credits created by the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden has resurrected the long-moribund factory-construction industry, spending on which increased by 73 percent in 2023 over the previous year. Those factories are going up, moreover, in the very regions that private capital had long abandoned, the very regions that Americans, by the evidence of this and other polls, want the government to revive.
Trump, of course, has consistently opposed the Inflation Reduction Act and vowed to hasten its repeal if elected. To be sure, factories take time to come online, but it takes no creative genius to envision Biden campaign ads showing factories under construction, featuring the workers building them, and contrasting those images with the vacant lots that are Trump’s industrial legacy and his vows to curtail the only upsurge in American industrial capacity in many decades.
Biden will need to campaign on a lot more than that, of course, but while there are very real limits on his ability to run on Bidenomics, this contrast is so visible, so tangible, that it surely merits some audible horn-tooting.
