Gavin Newsom denies UAW strike has given Trump a working-class voter opening

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) bristled at suggestions former President Donald Trump could successfully appeal to blue-collar voters amid the United Auto Workers strike and criticism of President Joe Biden‘s electric vehicle policies.

“This is all performance,” Newson told reporters on Monday. “Look at the record, look at Trump. It’s not assertion — this is proof points of what the Trump presidency did to manufacturing, what they did to the automobile industry.”

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Trump is skipping Wednesday’s second Republican primary debate and will instead speak to people in Detroit, Michigan, as the UAW’s targeted strike against the Big Three, which includes General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, and Stellantis, enters its second week. After acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and special adviser Gene Sperling decided against a trip to the battleground state last week, Biden announced he would visit the picket line on Tuesday. UAW President Shawn Fain has withheld his endorsement of Biden before next year’s election.

“So this is purely performative. It’s a similar version [of] just trying to get some attention like he did on Tucker Carlson, trying to deflect against the debate,” Newsom said of Trump during a Democratic National Committee pre-debate briefing call. “There’ll be no inroads whatsoever.”

“On the EV transition, there’s an inevitability here. The world is already moving in this direction, and we’ll do it in a way that’s inclusive. We always do that,” he added.”That includes workforce and includes a framework of engagement that I know the Biden administration is very sensitive to as it relates to the impact of electric vehicles, not just in terms of its manufacturing but the longer supply chain issues.”

Newsom has been tapped by Democrats to help counterprogram the debate, hosted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. Earlier in the call, the governor described the contrast between Democrats and Republicans as “daylight and darkness,” in addition to an embodiment of “forces of transformation” and “forces of restoration” during “a profound and existential moment in American history.”

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“Those that want to send America in reverse, those who want to take us back to a pre-1960s world, those that are attacking long-settled rights,” he said. “We’ve seen a party, the Republican Party, that’s on a cultural perch. Just ask the folks at Target or Bud Light, not just Disney and elsewhere. They’re banning books, banning speech. In certain states, they’re banning, quite literally, travel.”

Newsom also defended Biden’s economy, particularly regarding job creation, GDP growth, and deficit reduction, in response to the debate being co-hosted by Fox Business.