Harris kicks off fall campaign with Labor Day events at key locations | CNN Politics

CNN
–

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is holding a series of Labor Day events in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania on Monday, marking the unofficial launch of the fall campaign in states that will vote in November.

The developments come as Harris looks to increase his momentum over the next two months. While the Democratic presidential candidate wants to expand the map of the states where he is competing, Labor Day stops to point out the importance of winning the three “blue” states that promoted President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.

Biden joined Harris for a meeting in Pittsburgh on Monday evening, the first time the president and vice president have campaigned together since he ended his re-election bid and endorsed her. .

“I’ll be standing on the sidelines, but I’ll do my best to help,” Biden said. “Are you ready to make Donald Trump a loser again?”

Harris used the Pennsylvania incident to argue that US Steel should be domestic and that he opposes the purchase of the company by Japan’s Nippon Steel.

“The president said: US Steel is a historic American company, and it’s important to our nation to keep America’s steel companies strong. And I couldn’t agree more with President Biden, the US Steel should always be American and American,” Harris told the crowd of union members.

In a statement, a Nippon Steel spokesman defended the deal, arguing that “US Steel and the entire American steel industry will be in a very strong position” under the purchase.

Harris’s words in Pennsylvania are very consistent with the earlier event in Detroit, where he stressed the “dignity of work” and vowed to strengthen protections for collective bargaining to the crowd of union members and leaders, while expressing the difference that power and opponent Donald Trump.

“We celebrate unions because unions helped build America, and unions helped build the American middle class,” he told a packed high school gym here in Michigan.

Harris was joined on stage by union leaders, including United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten and National Education Association president Becky Pringle.

The vice president reiterated his support for the Pro Act, legislation that would guarantee workers’ rights to meet and collectively bargain for workplace reforms, and vowed to “end the union once and for all.”

Monday’s events come 64 days before Election Day, as Harris noted in his remarks, 24 days before mail-in voting begins in Michigan and 14 days before it begins in Pennsylvania. The vice president repeated previous warnings that the race would be close.

“I can tell you that we know the way they play, we know what they do,” he said. “So let’s not look too much at the polls. We don’t know, as the work is doing, we come out here running like the underdogs in this race because we know what we’re fighting for.

Meanwhile, his partner, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, proudly boasted of his organized labor relations at a union party in Milwaukee, celebrating Labor Day by describing himself as a “pocket” of unions of workers and dare to “roll the big dice” if they want to criticize his support for the job.

Walz detailed his union membership as a former public school teacher, his record of supporting unions in Congress and as governor of Minnesota, and highlighted Harris’ support for unions .

Trump and his partner, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, did not have any events scheduled on Monday. Trump used his website to criticize Harris over high gas and grocery costs and to promote his work on renegotiating the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact.

“We cannot continue to live under this weak and failed ‘Leadership,'” Trump said on Social Truth.

The Harris campaign knocked the former president out of holding events on the holiday.

“Donald Trump is abandoning workers on Labor Day because he is an anti-worker, anti-union extremist who will sell out working families for his billionaire donors if he takes office,” campaign spokesman Joseph Costello said in a statement.

Before Harris’ Labor Day speech in Detroit, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer praised the vice president’s record and blasted the Republican ticket for being cut off from the average person.

“Look, if your catchphrase is ‘You’re fired,’ you sure as hell don’t understand workers,” Whitmer later said, referring to Trump’s statement about his reality show. The Apprentice.” “I want our next President to say to the workers, whoever it is, I have your back.”

Whitmer said Harris was part of “the most pro-labor administration in American history,” and praised Harris’ work as a senator and attorney general in standing up for workers who vote and take over big banks and corporations. of pharmaceuticals, along with Walz’s work bringing infrastructure investment to his state and raising the minimum wage for delivery drivers.

Trump has been critical of labor leaders, including the United Auto Workers’ Fain, but he sought the support of workers in the same Rust Belt areas that Harris and Walz did on Monday. The former president focused his attention on the Biden administration’s efforts to expand the production and purchase of electric vehicles, which Trump said would come at the expense of auto workers.

Trump’s Michigan allies taunted Harris about the auto industry ahead of the president’s Labor Day trip to Detroit.

“What makes America great, in part, is our economy, and the Harris administration is coming after the jobs of auto workers,” Rep. Lisa McClain, Republican of Michigan, told reporters by phone Monday morning. “There will continue to be more jobs.”

McClain, who represents the northern part of the Detroit metro area, along with Rep. John James, who represents the neighboring district, both argued that the policies of the Biden-Harris administration meant to increase the production of electric cars in the US are unreasonable.

The Harris campaign has pushed back on previous allegations by Trump and Vance, including that the vice president supported a “mandate” for all electric vehicles. The administration’s goal is for EVs to account for half of new car sales by 2030.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

CNN’s Samantha Waldenberg and Aaron Pellish contributed to this story.