Trump Promised a Manufacturing Renaissance. What Happens in 2020 in Places That Lost Those Jobs?
DIMONDALE, Mich. — In August 2016, Donald J. Trump was full of promises when he spoke to a packed crowd at the Summit Sports and Ice Complex here. Predicting that he would carry Michigan, a state that had not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, Mr. Trump said his would be “a victory for the wage-earner, the factory worker, a victory for the everyday citizen.”
That pledge and his promise to bring back the industrial jobs were major reasons Mr. Trump carried Dimondale and the rest of Eaton County, an area heavily dependent on the automotive industry that voted for Barack Obama in 2012, and went on to carry Michigan in an upset crucial to his election.
But nothing has reversed the decline of the county’s manufacturing base. From January 2017 to December 2018, it lost nearly 9 percent of its manufacturing jobs, and 17 other counties in Michigan that Mr. Trump carried have experienced similar losses, according to a newly updated analysis of employment data by the Brookings Institution.
“To the extent that economic realities have the power to alter voting behavior, the trends are pointing in one direction in Michigan in a lot of these counties,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who directed the analysis.
And that makes it most likely that Michigan, which the president won by only 10,704 votes, could be a place where his expansive promises will come back to haunt him in 2020.
More troubling for Mr. Trump, some of the same forces are at work in the two other states that were critical to his Electoral College victory — Wisconsin, where 10 counties that he won in 2016 lost manufacturing jobs, and Pennsylvania, where eight counties that he carried faced manufacturing job losses.
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