Don’t Buy Kamala Harris’s Blue Collar Rhetoric

It appears to be a rule of modern politics that politicians must pander to voters. The latest example of this is Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s proposed $100-billion manufacturing plan, in an obvious drive to win over Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Her rival Donald Trump’s grand claims about import tariffs — especially high for Chinese goods — are aimed at winning the same voters.

Trump can at least claim that manufacturing grew during his tenure, although his pro-industry rhetoric tended to be more effective than his bite. In contrast, Vice President Harris’s new enthusiasm for industrial growth belies her own record and ideological orientation. The Biden administration has spent billions and placed great rhetorical emphasis on sparking manufacturing growth, but the results have been modest at best. Over the past year, the US has begun losing manufacturing jobs — something rarely acknowledged in the mainstream party press.

More telling, however, is Harris’s own record. As Attorney General of California, she enforced climate policies that were devastating to factories and virtually every sector of the “carbon economy”. Over the past decade, California has fallen into the bottom half of states in manufacturing sector employment growth, ranking 44th in 2022. Between 1990 and 2021, according to the Census of Employment Wages, California saw a reduction of 795,879 manufacturing jobs. What growth that has taken place more recently has been largely in Sun Belt states.

More worrisome still, even the tech industry is losing jobs in California. Data shows that the state has seen its share of the nation’s advanced-industry jobs stagnate while lower-tax states benefit from the exodus. Particularly devastating is the recent loss of SpaceX to Texas, meaning California — the home of Silicon Valley and Big Tech — will play a diminished role in the future of space exploration.

Despite Kamala Harris’s attempt to be the tribune of “people of colour” or a representative of the working class, her climate zealotry has disproportionately impacted ethnic-minority workers. Latino workers are overrepresented in these industries nationwide but in California they account for more than half of all transport sector workers, as well as manufacturing and construction workers. At the huge Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, regulations seeking to terminate gas-powered trucks endanger the jobs of the primarily Latino workers as the port faces strong competition from places such as Houston in Texas, Tampa in Florida and Norfolk in Virginia, which impose no such regulations.

Green policies implemented by the VP have pushed California’s energy prices well above the national average, spreading “energy poverty” to many communities, particularly in the less affluent interior. With the recent departure of oil giant Chevron, California — once a rival to Texas as an oil capital — now has no major energy firms located there. Essentially, the economy of places like inland Bakersfield have been sacrificed to fulfill the climate agenda of Harris’s base in the progressive coastal locales.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: by The White House; Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a reception for Black business leaders, via Flickr, in Public Domain.