The first topic of discussion in Wednesday night’s Republican presidential primary debate was the United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three auto manufacturers. The first candidate to address the underlying issues directly was former Vice President Mike Pence, who said the workers’ real enemy wasn’t the companies but President Joe Biden — because, allegedly, Biden’s support for electric vehicles is decimating the industry and sending jobs to China.
It’s “good for Beijing and bad for Detroit,” Pence said.
You may have heard a version of that argument before because it’s a favorite line of former president and 2024 GOP front-runner Donald Trump. You will almost certainly hear it again as it’s a great way to undermine one of Biden’s best campaign boasts, about how much he’s done to create manufacturing jobs.
But there’s very little to back up the Republican claim ― and an awful lot to suggest that it’s wrong.
Let’s start with the numbers. Since Biden took office in January 2021, total auto industry employment in the U.S. has risen from about 948,000 to 1,073,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a monthly rate of about 4,000 new auto jobs a month, as Jim Tankersley of The New York Times noted on Tuesday.
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