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      Trump Criticizes Harris on the Border and the Economy in Michigan

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      Former President Donald J. Trump crisscrossed the battleground state of Michigan on Friday, casting himself as an economic protectionist to blue-collar voters while attacking Vice President Kamala Harris over immigration on the same day she visited the southern border. Mr. Trump used a pair of events to try to blame Ms. Harris for inflation and the migrant crisis, tapping into some of the populist themes that helped him win Michigan — and the presidency — in the 2016 election. In 2020, the state flipped for President Biden.In the afternoon, the former president visited a manufacturing facility near Grand Rapids before holding a town hall event in the Detroit suburbs that started around 90 minutes late and ended after just a half-hour. At the second event, in Warren, Mich., Mr. Trump vowed, if Congress did not act, to use executive action to enact protective tariffs to limit the flow of imports from China and other countries that he said were killing jobs in the state. “The word ‘tariff’ I love,” he said at Macomb Community College, where he was joined onstage by Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, one of his staunchest allies in the Senate who served as the town hall’s moderator. Mr. Trump fielded a handful of friendly questions from his supporters that set up familiar talking points and lines of attack. He said Americans were forgoing certain comforts because they could no longer afford them under the Biden-Harris administration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rashida Tlaib was unfairly smeared by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Here’s a handy tip: before you comment on an article, read the whole damn thing. Don’t just read the headline, don’t just read a paragraph someone screenshot and put on social media – read the whole thing. This one weird trick is very helpful when it comes to ensuring you’re not taking something dangerously out of context or just making up facts entirely.This advice isn’t addressed to you, dear reader. I’m sure that you don’t need to be told something so basic. Rather it is addressed to everyone – including some very prominent cable news anchors – who has spent the last few days spreading inflammatory misinformation about the Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. It’s addressed to everyone who has falsely and dangerously claimed that Tlaib said that the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, only filed charges against pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan because she is Jewish. Which, if this is what Tlaib actually said, would obviously be an outrageous statement.But here’s what actually happened: on 13 September Tlaib had an interview with Steve Neavling from the Detroit Metro Times where she talked about crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests. In this interview Tlaib criticized Nessel for filing charges against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan when her office hadn’t done the same in relation to other protests. Tlaib said the following:“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest … We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”Nowhere in the interview did Tlaib mention anything about Nessel’s personal identity, but Neavling’s article frames Tlaib’s quote with a sentence explaining “Nessel is the first Jewish person to be elected Attorney General of Michigan.”Neavling has since made clear that sentence was not meant to insinuate Tlaib was talking about Nessel being Jewish when she talked about biases; rather Tlaib was referring to anti-Palestinian attitudes that are pervasive in US institutions. Further on in the original interview, Tlaib also explains what she thinks influenced Nessel’s decision to charge pro-Palestinian protestors, suggesting the attorney general was being pressured by university authorities.Neavling quotes Tlaib as saying the following: “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on [Nessel] to do this, and she fell for it … I think President Ono and Board of Regent members were very much heavy-handed in this. It had to come from somewhere.”To recap: absolutely nowhere in the original interview did Tlaib say Nessel charged pro-Palestinian protesters because she’s Jewish. And yet that inflammatory claim has spread dangerously far and wide. On Friday, Nessel herself addressed it in a tweet also referencing a cartoon implying Tlaib was a member of Hezbollah.“Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong. Just as Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong,” wrote Nessel on X.From there, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper picked up the smear. In an interview with Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, on Sunday, Tapper said the following:“Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish.”Again, that’s not what Tlaib suggested; it’s a very dangerous contortion of what she said.Still, on Monday, CNN’s Dana Bash continued to advance this narrative. And then, on Tuesday, 21 House Democrats released a statement accusing Nessel’s critics of antisemitism. It didn’t specifically name Tlaib but it was very clear who this statement was directed to.While all this was going on, by the way, Neavling – the guy who interviewed Tlaib in the first place – was desperately trying to correct the narrative. Neavling repeatedly tweeted at Tapper and Bash that they were lying. “Now Dana Bash from CNN is lying about what happened,” Neavling wrote in a tweet on Monday. “US Representative @RashidaTlaib did not say Nessel filed the charges because she’s Jewish. She said there is an anti-Palestinian attitude among many institutions, and most of them are not run by Jewish people.” Neavling has also published a comprehensive factcheck of what happened.Despite this factcheck and repeated requests by Neavling for people to stop “spreading lies”, the people responsible for advancing this false narrative have not adequately walked it back or apologized.Nessel’s office has declined my request to clarify whether or not the attorney general believes Tlaib is antisemitic and what evidence Nessel has for spreading this claim. Instead it provided a statement saying: “Our department is staffed with many experienced, professional prosecutors and any allegation of bias within our agency is baseless and unfortunate.”CNN has also declined to speak on the record about the matter but has emphasized that Tapper said on Monday that he “misspoke” when characterizing Tlaib’s comments. Bash has also clarified that “Tlaib did not reference Nessel’s Jewish identity” but continued to say that “Nessel still says she believes it’s antisemitic.”Admitting to misspeaking just isn’t good enough. CNN has spent days amplifying a news story centered around a fabricated quote. And these smears aren’t just insulting, they put Tlaib in danger. The congresswoman, let me remind you, is the only Palestinian American federal lawmaker and has been the subject of death threats, smears and conspiracies since the start of her political career. She has suffered an immense amount of hate for speaking up about Palestinians and her words have routinely been twisted and taken out of context to paint her in the worst possible light. This latest misinformation campaign is yet more of the same.Of course, what’s happening to Tlaib isn’t unique. Advocating for basic Palestinian human rights has always been billed as somehow “controversial” in the US. Since 7 October, however, speaking up about what many human right experts have termed a “genocide” in Gaza puts you at the risk of losing your job and becoming the subject of smear campaigns. Calling out or protesting against a genocide now seems to be considered a worse crime than committing one.For almost a year now, being a Palestinian in the US has meant waking up every morning to images of children in Gaza who have been dismembered by US-made bombs. It means watching helplessly as Gaza is made completely uninhabitable. It means reading letters from doctors who have been in Gaza talking about treating “pre-teen children who were shot in the head” by Israeli soldiers. It means hearing violent and dehumanizing comments from elected officials like the US House representative Tim Walberg of Michigan, who said Gaza should “be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima”.Palestinians are being starved, displaced and bombed off the face of the earth. And as US politicians and pundits mock our pain and cheerlead our slaughter, they have the temerity to tell Palestinians and our supporters that we’re the hateful ones. As 2,000-pound bombs keep dropping on tent encampments full of starving children, Israel’s apologists have the audacity to tell us that we’re the violent ones.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Gretchen Whitmer calls Trump ‘deranged’ after comments on abortion

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      Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, called Donald Trump “just deranged” on Sunday after he said women would no longer be thinking about abortion if he is elected as president in November.“This guy just doesn’t understand what the average woman is confronting in her life in this country, and how could he? He’s not lived a normal life,” Whitmer said in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.Whitmer also reaffirmed her support for Kamala Harris, describing her as a person “who has worked hourly jobs, who knows how important it is that women have healthcare and access to the medical care that they need”.Whitmer was asked to comment about a speech the former president delivered on Saturday, saying women “will be happy, healthy, confident, and free” if he is elected president.“He’s just deranged,” the governor of Michigan said.On Friday, Trump made similar comments about women on his Truth Social platform.“WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO … AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO!” Trump said.Harris is a staunch supporter of abortion rights. The vice-president delivered two speeches on Friday, first in Georgia and then Wisconsin, highlighting the case of Amber Thurman, who died in Georgia due to a strict abortion ban.Whitmer’s comments on Sunday come a week after participating in an online campaign event with TV host, producer and author Oprah Winfrey, which was livestreamed nationally from Michigan.The Michigan governor was previously named as a possible candidate for the Democratic nomination for president before ruling herself out in July. Michigan is a must-win prize for candidates, a state that has voted for the presidential winner in the last four national elections.Joe Biden took Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020. Two years later, Whitmer defeated a Trump-backed candidate and Democrats took full control for the first time in 45 years. More

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      in US Politics

      Saginaw: the swing county in the swing state that could decide the election

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      A local law says that residents of Saginaw Township in Michigan cannot publicly display political signs in support of a presidential candidate until 30 days before the US election, even on their own front lawns.But you wouldn’t know it while driving through this neat midwestern township that borders a town of the same name – simply, Saginaw – in the most closely contested county, also called Saginaw, of a battleground state that Donald Trump won in 2016 when he took the White House and then lost in 2020 when Joe Biden wrested it from his control.With more than six weeks until what many Americans regard as the most consequential US presidential election in decades, some Saginaw Township residents have defied the ban to declare their loyalties to their neighbors. Trump campaign signs outnumber those for Kamala Harris, but scattered among them are posters proclaiming that the former US president is a convicted felon who belongs in prison and not the Oval Office.One Saginaw Township resident interpreted the newfound unwillingness of local officials to enforce their own ban on political signs as a desire to avoid confrontation in these politically charged times.For Saginaw Township’s population, there is the added weight that not all votes are equal in the US thanks to the vagaries of the electoral college system and that theirs count for more than most. The county is crucial to who wins Michigan and the state looks likely to be pivotal in deciding the next occupant of the White House.In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Saginaw county by just 1.1% of the ballot as he took Michigan by less than 11,000 votes. Four years later, Biden won back the county for the Democrats by only 303 votes as he once again returned the state into the Democratic column.View image in fullscreenThis year, the Harris campaign sees Michigan as a key part of its clearest path to victory alongside two other Rust belt states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Saginaw county will be a litmus test of whether the Democratic nominee can pull that off and keep Trump from returning for a second term that many observers fear will risk authoritarianism in the USA.So Saginaw is an ideal place from which to observe this epic US presidential election, the third in a row with Trump on the ballot – and not just because the vote has been so close in the past. The state of this county mirrors many of the issues faced by other places that will decide this contest.Saginaw has a once-booming industrial base in long decline but which is still important. Widespread poverty exists alongside prosperous suburbs in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the country. There are changing racial demographics and, for many, a sense of drift with no clear plan for the future.In the US’s Democratic-dominated big urban centers – such as New York, Los Angeles and Seattle – it is not uncommon to hear Americans wonder how it is that this year’s election is even close given Trump’s political and criminal record. Many seem to be still grappling with the same questions that surfaced eight years ago when he stunned the nation by defeating Hillary Clinton. At times, it feels as if they regard places like Saginaw county as a distant, foreign landscape.Seen from Saginaw, however, the election can look very different.View image in fullscreenThe Guardian asked people who live in the county to tell us where we should go, who we should talk to and what we should look at in order to understand the area and its place in the election.Among those who replied was Geordie Wilson, a former teacher, who wrote: “Saginaw is possibly the most economically and racially divided area in the country. It is the epicenter of our national divide.”Several people mentioned their fears about the future of American democracy if Trump returns to the White House, including Jamie Forbes, who is recently married and works for the local public transport system. Forbes also spoke about the economy, a common theme nationally and locally. He said he wants to see “wealthy people and corporations paying their fair share in taxes”.“Saginaw issues: Continuing attempts for our economy to recover from automakers pulling jobs, attraction and diversification of new industry, crime, small business success,” he wrote.Valerie Silvernaile, a medical procedure scheduler, said it was important to protect workers’ rights in the industries that remain.“Unions are important here. We need a candidate who isn’t a union buster,” she said.One middle-aged man said he has never voted but will this year, for Trump: “Food prices, safety and jobs. Trump has addressed all of this for me between listening to him and his website.”Michael Colucci, a chemical engineer who has lived in Saginaw Township for 40 years, wrote that “you can visit all of America in a 20-mile stretch along M-46”, the Michigan highway running east to west through the county.View image in fullscreen“Most Americans live in communities where most people think like them. Saginaw is small enough that everyone has the occasion to interact with everyone else,” he said.Colucci, who lives in an electoral precinct where Trump and Hillary Clinton each won 49.5% of the vote in 2016, took the Guardian on a drive to show what he meant. It began in the city of Saginaw, which Colucci calls a “mini Detroit” for its abandoned factories and housing.In 1968, Saginaw was one of 10 communities across the US awarded the title of “All-America City” by the National Civic League. Those were the boom times.Since then, the population of the city has dropped by more than half to fewer than 45,000 people, as jobs disappeared and residents decamped. That also drove a change in Saginaw’s demographics. Twenty-five years ago, Saginaw city was about evenly divided between white and Black residents in addition to a Latino minority. The white population has dropped sharply, to less than 35%.Colucci pointed out mansions built by the lumber barons whose sawmills drove the city’s 19th-century development when demand for timber from Michigan’s pine forests surged as the US colonised lands to the west. But more often, there were just grass-covered patches of ground where auto factories and shopping malls once stood.Some of the first cars built in America were assembled in Saginaw. Over decades, factories drew in workers from across the country to manufacture gear boxes and steering assemblies fitted into vehicles in Detroit. Saginaw city and its environs were home to a dozen General Motors plants.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy the 1980s, the industry was in rapid retreat from Saginaw. The last GM plant, today called Saginaw Metal Casting Operations, employed 7,000 people in 1970. Now it provides work to fewer than 350.The factories stood abandoned for years, symbols of a lost prosperity, until the Biden administration provided funds to tear them down. When the jobs went, shops and hotels closed. In the heart of downtown, department stores have given way to public services including an employment office, a college and a healthcare centre for lower-income families.View image in fullscreenA brand-new school opened on the riverbank this month. But it, too, is a testament to decline after attendance at the city’s two main high schools, once sharp sporting rivals, fell so low that they were closed and combined.Simon & Garfunkel’s iconic 1960s song America was written in the city and includes a line about taking “four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw”. Fifteen years ago, an artists collective, Paint Saginaw, daubed lyrics from the song on dozens of abandoned factories, bridges and empty buildings, including the line: “All gone to look for America,” as a lament to people moving out. But the population had not so much gone to look for America as shuffled a few miles down the road.As Colucci drives west, he crosses from the city, passes the sprawling golf course of Saginaw Country Club, and heads into the suburbs of Saginaw Township.In 1980, the city was nearly four times as large as the township. Now, they are about the same size after many residents of one bled into the other. But the township has nearly twice the median income and is 89% white.Crossing from one to the other, the quality of housing changes fast. So do the voting patterns.Saginaw city overwhelmingly voted against Trump in both the presidential elections he contested. Clinton won 76% of the ballot in 2016 and Biden pulled in similar support four years later.Saginaw Township was a different story. Trump beat Clinton there by three points in 2016. Four years later, he lost by a similar margin to Biden.In other words, it wasn’t the poorest part of Saginaw that once delivered for Trump but one of the most prosperous. Colucci has an explanation.“Trump promises them that he’s going to stop the world from changing,” he said.Then he scoffs: “He promised to stop coal disappearing and it literally disappeared while he was president.”The outcome of this election is likely to hang on turnout. Trump’s vote in Michigan went up in 2020 but he was beaten because many of those Democrats who stayed home four years earlier came out to remove him from the White House.View image in fullscreenColucci volunteered for Clinton’s campaign but lamented that her organisers placed too much confidence in data, didn’t listen to local advice and failed miserably to mobilise Democratic voters on election day. It is an often bitterly expressed complaint heard repeatedly over the years across Rust belt states that Clinton should have won.Biden’s campaign evidently did better and there are clear signs that Harris has learned the lessons. But the challenge remains.Nearly 75% of registered voters in Saginaw Township cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election. Fewer than 50% of Saginaw city turned out.In other Trump strongholds such as Frankenmuth, a small city in the south-east of the county known as Little Bavaria, turnout was 82%. Frankenmuth, which celebrates its German heritage in its architecture and its own Oktoberfest this weekend, twice voted overwhelmingly for Trump and his anti-immigrant agenda.Still, nothing is a given.Among those who contacted the Guardian was Mark Paredes, a former US diplomat and lifelong conservative who said he would never vote for Trump and is therefore supporting Harris.“If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be doing this, I would have been quite amused,” he wrote. More

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders Jabs at Harris for Not Having Biological Children

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      Introducing former President Donald J. Trump at a town-hall event in Michigan on Tuesday, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas extolled the virtue of humility in politics with an amusing story: She once teared up while watching her daughter get ready for a father-daughter dance, and her daughter said, “It’s OK, Mommy, one day you can be pretty too.”“So my kids keep me humble,” Ms. Sanders said. Then, mispronouncing Vice President Kamala Harris’s name, she added, “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”The comment was widely interpreted as a reference to Ms. Harris not having biological children; she has two stepchildren. Coming from a surrogate for a campaign whose vice-presidential nominee, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, has been criticized for his past description of Democratic leadership as “childless cat ladies,” Ms. Sanders’s remark quickly prompted bipartisan backlash, including from Bryan Lanza, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign.Mr. Lanza said on CNN that the remark was “actually offensive” and that he was “disappointed in Sarah.”Several Democratic-aligned groups highlighted the remark on social media, including the super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, Young Democrats of America and Republican Voters Against Trump. So did TV commentators.“Whoa,” Mika Brzezinski said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday. “What is their obsession with women without children of their biological connection?” A spokeswoman for Ms. Sanders did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Ms. Harris’s campaign.Kerstin Emhoff — the ex-wife of Ms. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, and the mother of Ms. Harris’s stepchildren — defended Ms. Harris.“Cole and Ella keep us inspired to make the world a better place,” she said in a social media post, referring to her children. “I do it through storytelling. Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families. That keeps you pretty humble.”Mr. Vance has raised eyebrows on the matter of parenting before. In 2021, he said that perhaps parents “should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids,” a suggestion that he later said was a “thought experiment” and not serious.He has also said he wasn’t disparaging women without children, while doubling down on describing Democrats as “anti-family.”His “childless cat ladies” remark has become something of a cultural phenomenon among supporters of Ms. Harris. In one sign of its continuing resonance, Taylor Swift used it to sign off her endorsement of Ms. Harris last week. More

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      ‘Democrats are losing’: a battle on EVs could cost Kamala Harris votes in Michigan

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      As the critical swing state of Michigan hangs in the balance, experts warn that Democrats’ poor messaging over the shift to electric vehicles could lose them the state in November’s election.“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one, thereby saving the US auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now,” Donald Trump told the Republican national convention in a speech this summer that would reach tens of millions of people.Despite his burgeoning friendship with Tesla’s Elon Musk, Trump has remained a consistent critic of EVs and battery-powered vehicles more generally. The messaging has resonated with many United Auto Workers (UAW) members, eroding Joe Biden’s support among union members in Michigan by as much as 25 points since the 2020 election.The claim that EVs require less labor is probably not true: multiple studies and industry executives have said it takes about as much or more labor to produce EVs. Still, the Biden-Harris campaign has not pushed that essential point, and in the process is losing the messaging war over EVs, imperiling Democrats’ chances in tightly contested Michigan as union support sputters, according to Bernie Porn, an Epic-MRA Michigan pollster.“Biden and Democrats are doing a lousy job on messaging [on EVs],” said Porn. “Democrats are losing support … but they’ve been silent.”Autoworker votes are critical to Michigan and other must-win upper midwest industrial swing states – Trump won there by a narrow 10,000 votes in 2016.Biden retook the state with broad union support four years later, but by late 2023, union members here preferred Trump over Biden by a 47-40 margin, Epic-MRA found. Following the UAW endorsement early this year, Biden’s support among unions bounced up to 52% – but still 13 points below the last election.About 55% of state residents are also opposed to the EV transition, polling found.Trump’s claim that the EV transition represents the US auto industry’s death knell began to deeply worry union members as Biden guided the nation into the EV transition via the billions of dollars of investment in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and Inflation Reduction Act.Trump regularly claims EVs require up to 40% less labor to make than gasoline cars, a statistic repeated by Brian Pannebecker, who backs Trump and is a former UAW member.Even with the evidence that EVs take the same or more time to produce, skepticism among many autoworkers persists, he said.“Of course we’re not going like that,” Pannebecker said. “We’d be suicidal or stupid if we did.”But Trump’s claims are not true, and the job-creating power of EVs is “the biggest secret in politics”, said Mike Murphy, a Republican with the EV Politics Project, a non-profit that pushes for stronger EV policy.Its recent focus groups and polling found people across the political spectrum are more supportive of EVs when they learn that it creates jobs, and EV Politics Project is planning to air a television commercial that hits on that point in the coming weeks.“I don’t know why the Biden-Harris administration has been so bad at telling the story,” Murphy added. “They need to go on the offense.”Democrats could point to recent General Motors statements on the issue.“We’ve done our own analysis at General Motors, and there are other studies that have affirmed that the employee base needed in the future for EV production is very similar to what’s needed for a comparable [internal combustion] vehicle today,” GM executive Gerald Johnson said.GM is building a massive new battery plant in Michigan, which has the most announced battery production nationwide. At least seven plants have opened or are in the works, and UAW leadership has been supportive of the EV expansion.A spokesperson for UAW said support for the EV transition among union members was strong, dismissing opposition within its ranks as rooted in partisan politics.Parsing EV productionThe idea that EV production requires fewer hours can be traced back to several out-of-context comments made by auto executives and companies underestimating the time demands in 2017, a Heatmap analysis found.Trump has run with the comments, and the messaging has bounced around the echo chamber without much media scrutiny. On its face the claim makes sense – EVs require fewer parts in their powertrain, so it takes less time to assemble.The powertrain is what propels the car, and in gas-powered vehicles it contains over 1,000 parts that make up the engine and transmission. An EV powertrain is seemingly simpler – just a few hundred components with batteries, electric motors and power management systems.But industry observers say the claims about labor hours seem to omit battery packs. And when every component and the complexity of the EV powertrain production process is factored in, it takes about the same or more time to put it together, a recent Carnegie Mellon study found.The research used shop floor level data and interviews with autoworkers at nine plants to determine how long it takes to make each EV powertrain part. The researchers found EV powertrains require about two to three times more labor to produce than gas – up to 11 worker hours per gas powertrain compared with up to 24 worker hours for a battery powertrain.“You need to unpack the black box of the production process to figure out whether the assembly time reduction was outweighed by an increase in fabrication complexity,“ said Christophe Combemale, a study co-author. “We can say very strongly at the moment the evidence suggests it takes as many or perhaps more labor hours to produce [an EV powertrain].”Recent University of Michigan research took a different approach. It examined output at three factories where EV production replaced gas production. It found output is higher at gas plants, meaning more hours are required to build EVs – a former California GM/Toyota plant produced 80 vehicles per person per year, while a Tesla plant now in the facility averages 30.Researchers at the Boston Consulting Group came to a similar conclusion in an analysis that looked at an entire car’s assembly. It also noted time-consuming complexities in EV production, like the battery pack’s heavy weight, which requires the rest of the car to be much lighter than a gas-powered vehicle. The Tesla Model S battery pack weighs more than half a ton, which is offset by using aluminum instead of steel, as is standard with gas vehicles, the paper notes.However, aluminum is “trickier to work with in a factory” because it is comparatively weak, the paper states, demanding expensive adjustments like spot welding to shore up its strength. The installation of the charging unit, additional wiring, battery loading and alignment all require time not needed in gas assembly.“This is a significant change for an industry that has spent more than 100 years developing and improving engine manufacturing and vehicle assembly to the highest degrees of efficiency,” the paper states.CaveatsAs the nascent EV production process matures, automakers will find efficiencies that will reduce the manufacturing time. Meanwhile, while the EV market is growing, sales have been slower than expected, and some Michigan plants have recently laid off workers or scaled back employment figures.In his critique of EVs, Pannebecker, the Trump-backing former UAW member, pointed out the most obvious caveat to research showing they take more hours: batteries and their components largely are not made in the US at the moment, so they are not of use to the UAW.“No matter which way you look at it, it’s a losing proposition for autoworkers,” Pannebecker said.As much as 80% of lithium ion batteries are estimated to be produced in China, but that is changing. A slew of battery plants are scheduled to come online in the US in the coming years in addition to more than 30 already operating, and five of those will be in Michigan.Even if those plants are built, Pannebecker noted, many of them are not unionized and only pay $15-$18 an hour. Near Youngstown, Ohio, an Ultium battery plant near the once-storied GM Lordstown plant suffers from high turnover because of the low pay that workers there say is in line with a local Waffle House.But that is also changing. Late last year and early this year the UAW made battery plants a priority in its negotiations with automakers, and the plants’ workers can now unionize.Meanwhile, the Chips and Science Act aimed at reshoring the semiconductor industry that produces critical components to EVs is also helping shift component production to the US. Combemale said there is some potential for autoworkers to be retrained or take on jobs in semiconductor plants or other higher tech settings than a shop floor.Still, this broad narrative does not seem to be reaching many Michiganders, whether in a union or not. The most recent polling shows only 56% of Michigan union members approve of the EV transition – far below the 74% of Democrats who approve of it. Meanwhile, union members’ families disapprove by a 51-45% margin, and support among independent voters is even lower.But it’s not too late to change the messaging for this election, and into the future, said EV Politics’ Murphy. Part of the problem may be generational within union ranks – older guys are less supportive because they won’t be around as the EV transition progresses, Murphy said.Democrats need to stop making EVs an environmental issue, which will “divide the voters in half”, Murphy said, and instead push the job creation narrative. His focus groups found an up to 19-point improvement on EV approval rating when messaging focused on the latter.“It’s a very powerful way to reframe the argument,” Murphy said. “It’s one of the best bragging rights they’ve got. This isn’t hard, it’s just a story no one knows.” More

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      In His Last Months as President, Biden Is Both Liberated and Resigned

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      President Biden spent decades seeking the highest office, only to drop his bid for re-election under pressure. These final months before the November election are bittersweet, his allies say.President Biden began the final stretch of his political career this week freed from the rigors of running for re-election, appearing by turns nostalgic, liberated and — in some cases — resigned to finding himself once again in a supporting role.After a two-week summer vacation, Mr. Biden has been campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris, now at the top of the Democratic ticket, and traveling the country to promote his administration’s accomplishments.But for a man who has spent decades seeking the highest office, only to drop his bid for re-election under pressure from his own party, these final months before the November election are bittersweet, his allies say.“For my whole career I’ve either been too young or too old, never in between,” Mr. Biden told a crowd of union workers on Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich. The president, who was not yet 30 when he first won a Senate seat in 1972, cracked that he went on to serve for “374 years.”Earlier in the week, Mr. Biden appeared unbothered about alienating conservatives when he attacked Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — in the Republican’s home state — for not voting for the Inflation Reduction Act, the president’s signature legislation.And on Monday in Pittsburgh, during an event with Ms. Harris, Mr. Biden did not seem particularly keen to cede the spotlight. He spoke eight minutes longer than the vice president, even as he said he would be “on the sidelines” going forward.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Brothers Sentenced to More Than 17 Years in Prison in Sextortion Scheme

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      Two brothers from Nigeria helped run an online sextortion operation that prosecutors said resulted in the death of a high school student.A federal judge in Michigan on Thursday sentenced two brothers from Nigeria to 17 and a half years in prison for their roles in a social media sextortion scheme that claimed more than 100 victims across the United States and resulted in the death of a high school student.The brothers, Samuel Ogoshi, 24, and Samson Ogoshi, 21, who each pleaded guilty in April to one count of conspiracy to exploit minors, will be on supervised release for five years after completing their prison terms, prosecutors said in a news release.The brothers, who are from Lagos, Nigeria, were extradited to the United States from Nigeria in August 2023 after they were indicted in November 2022.The extradition marked a new chapter in cooperation with Nigerian authorities in extraditing perpetrators of this kind of scam. Last month, the Justice Department announced the extradition of two other Nigerian nationals on similar charges in Pennsylvania.A third defendant in the case, Ezekiel Robert, is pending extradition from Nigeria, prosecutors said.The brothers were sentenced in a case involving a popular relatively new scam the authorities call financial sextortion, in which scammers pose as young women on social media and send flirty messages to young men and teenage boys before soliciting nude photographs that they then hold as ransom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More