‘Where are the jobs?’: as US autoworkers face offshoring, Democrats vie to win votes

Workers who voted for Trump and Republicans in recent elections are now being hit with offshoring and the impacts of tariffs – but can Democrats sway them?

B renda Davis, a retiree who worked at Ford in Ohio for more than 20 years, was dismayed to learn that a new Buick she bought from General Motors was manufactured entirely in China . Foreign vehicles are strongly discouraged from parking lots at autoworkers’ facilities, as they serve as a reminder of the ongoing threat outsourcing poses to their livelihoods.

Morgan Hughes, who currently works at the General Motors assembly plant in Springfield, Ohio , is worried about the impact tariffs have had on her plant’s dwindling workload and its recent sale to a different owner, as concerns over a plant closure have loomed over the factory for years.

Davis and Hughes are just two of the voices Democratic congressional representatives and policy experts heard from recently in meetings with workers in union halls across the midwest to address US trade policies and tariffs as they struggle to win back blue-collar voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections – voters who handed Donald Trump both his presidential wins.

The series of town halls organized by Public Citizen in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa, with labor unions such as the United Auto Workers, are aimed at addressing the damage of long-term trade policies that catalyzed offshoring in the US midwest – a trend that was key to Trump’s election wins in 2016 and 2024 in these historical swing states.

The Guardian recently spoke with several current and retired autoworkers in Ohio and Michigan about their experiences with offshoring, US trade policies, Trump’s promises about reviving manufacturing in the US and what they think the Democratic party needs to do to win over workers who bought into Trump’s rhetoric and voted for him and Republicans in recent elections.

US manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979 at about 19.6m , but have been declining ever since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), initiated by Republican George HW Bush and signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton in 1994. Its replacement, Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2020, did little to stem the decline.

Tens of thousands of factories and manufacturing facilities shuttered after the passage of Nafta, pushed as a free trade agreement that would create jobs. Currently, there are about 12.6m manufacturing jobs in the US.