A new DNC ad in Michigan authorized by the Harris-Walz campaign aims to pin Michigan’s woeful economy on Donald Trump. 

Michigan. pic.twitter.com/5NIph9nodQ

— Morgan J. Freeman (@mjfree) October 12, 2024

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With Trump pulling ahead in Michigan polls, Democrats’ strategy in the final weeks of the November election could backfire: the campaign is banking on short memories—and voters forgetting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s disastrous COVID lockdowns. 

The billboards claim hundreds of thousands of jobs lost and an undetermined number of auto plants closed during Trump’s administration.

Short memories aside, the ads’ projections of Democrat failures onto the shoulders of former President Trump obscure the reality of U.S. and Michigan pandemic recovery job gains under the Biden-Harris administration. 

Data behind post-pandemic job recovery and job gains for foreign-born workers could prove a liability for Harris in Michigan.

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The new DNC and Harris ad campaign obscures critical context — the disastrous effects of 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns. States eviscerated employment sectors in 2020, and Michigan was no different. 

Whitmer signed Michigan’s ‘Stay Home, Stay Safe’ Executive Order March 23, 2020. Prior to the lockdowns, jobs in Michigan held strong, with more than 620,000 employed in the state’s manufacturing sector, according to Federal Reserve St. Louis FRED data. By April of that year, manufacturing jobs had cratered by 219,000 to just over 400,000. 

Michigan’s manufacturing recovery crested in June of 2023, but never reached pre-pandemic levels. The state has posted manufacturing jobs losses in 2024 and is down 16,000 since its post-pandemic peak. 

Strikingly, Michigan’s manufacturing sector hasn’t recovered as much as the state’s other sectors, according to FRED’s total, non-farm employment figures, showing manufacturing lagging under Whitmer and the Biden-Harris administration. 

The U.S. as a whole shed 22 million jobs in the month following the lockdowns. In February 2020, the United States had the greatest number of total, non-farm jobs in the country’s history. By April, the country had shed 22 million of its 152 million jobs. It took more than two years to regain pre-pandemic levels. 

The U.S. manufacturing sector as a share of the economy itself crested in the late 1970s, but saw its years of growth since 2008 plateau under the Biden-Harris administration. 

While FRED data shows September 2024 U.S. jobs numbers reaching their highest ever, with 159 million in the workforce, the data conceals hazards for Democrats. 

Harris’ liability on the economy when courting voters in an ailing economy could prove devastating to Democrats’ 2024 hopes — because of the confluence of jobs data with the 2024 election’s top issue, immigration. 

Beyond obscuring the disastrous effects of Whitmer’s COVID lockdowns, missing from Democratic messaging on jobs under the Biden-Harris administration is the nasty U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ habit of revising jobs reports downward months after they were initially reported.. 

In August, BLS announced a downward revision of its figures through March of 2024 by 818,000, the largest such revision since 2009. The revision flashed warning lights throughout the economy, signaling weakness even as stocks saw all time highs. 

Left-leaning economists attempted to front run the revision, but their research still showed post-pandemic job gains failing to achieve pre-pandemic levels. 

However, bombshell data on job gains under the Biden-Harris administration shows virtually all of the jobs added in recent years have gone to foreign-born workers, not U.S. workers. 

According to ZeroHedge, net jobs gains in the August report were part-time employment, with a net gain of more than half a million part-time jobs, but a loss of nearly half a million full-time jobs. The August jobs data show 1.3 million native-born U.S. workers now out of work, and 635,000 net jobs gains for foreign-born workers. 

On net, U.S. workers have lost 1.4 million jobs over the past five years, while a staggering 3 million jobs have gone to foreign-born workers. 

In other words, the Biden-Harris administration’s economy has favored the beneficiaries of its open border policy, while U.S. workers are holding the bag. 

The DNC’s and Kamala Harris’ Michigan messaging blaming pandemic job losses on Trump, on its face, runs cover for Whitmer’s COVID executive orders. However, the ads conceal a landmine for Harris in Michigan: Democrats’ liabilities for the fruits of the Biden-Harris open-borders agenda and U.S. workers who lost jobs to cheaper foreign labor.