In today’s Times, Peter S. Goodman writes about the devastating effects which Donald Trump has had on his own voters in Michigan.
In Holland, Michigan, Goodman met Pat LeBlanc, 63, a Republican who voted for Trump in 2016. LeBlanc is the chairman of EBW Electronics, which makes lights for the auto industry.
In that part of Michigan, plants everywhere have closed and moved their operations to Mexico, but not EBW Electronics. It stayed right there in Holland.
Except that now, the company is very reluctantly thinking about moving its production to Mexico to escape the tariffs that Trump has put on imported components; those components are Trump’s primary weapons in the trade war that he, not Xi Jingping, started against China, in the name of bringing jobs home to America.
“I just feel so betrayed,” LeBlanc told Goodman. “If we fail because the company is being harmed by [our] government, that just makes me sick.”
As Goodman was leaving LeBlanc’s manufacturing plant, associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones spoke with Mr. LeBlanc.
“Know what, Johanna?” LeBlanc said. “I just changed my registration to Democratic, and I’m going to go door to door for whomever the Democrats put forward to run against the man who betrayed me back in November 2016.”
ASR Jones spoke with hundreds of other Republicans in western Michigan, and to a person they all said the same thing.
Trump won Michigan over Hillary Clinton by exactly 10,704 votes. The total number of votes cast in Michigan’s presidential election that year was 4,799,284.
In 2020, the Democratic nominee will prevail in Michigan by at least one hundred seven thousand votes — most probably, many more than that.