Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to announce that U.S. Steel should remain domestically owned and not move forward with an overseas merger at a campaign event in Pennsylvania on Monday.
Her planned statement coincides with an earlier sentiment from the White House opposing U.S. Steel’s planned sale to the Japan-based Nippon Steel. Harris will make these statements alongside President Joe Biden as she and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), her running mate, separately embark on a tour of the Midwest on Labor Day to tout their commitment to workers.
Harris “is expected to say that U.S. Steel should remain domestically owned and operated and stress her commitment to always have the backs of American steelworkers,” a campaign official said.
Last December, Nippon agreed to buy U.S. Steel and later said the merger would be completed in the “second half of 2024, subject to the fulfillment of the remaining, customary closing conditions, including the receipt of required U.S. regulatory approvals.”
Her expected remarks mirror those of the president. Before Biden exited the presidential race, he visited United Steelworkers headquarters, where he expressed his opposition to the plan.
“U.S. Steel has been an iconic American company for more than a century, and it should remain a totally American company,” Biden said during an April visit to Pittsburgh. “American-owned, American-operated by American union steelworkers, the best in the world. And that’s going to happen. I promise you.”
Pittsburgh has a long history with the steel industry, dating back to the Gilded Age. The city was once the center of the booming steel industry and is the headquarters of some of the largest mills in the country, including U.S. Steel and Ampco Pittsburgh.
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Harris and Biden will attend Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade. The Harris campaign said Biden would be deployed “strategically” to states he won in 2020, such as Pennsylvania, and those with voting demographics Biden bodes well in, such as laborers and older voters.
Pennsylvania has the most electoral votes of all the swing states, with 19, and is seen as a “must-win” state by Harris and former President Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump flipped the state red for the first time since 1988, while in 2020, Biden turned the state blue once again by more than 80,000 votes.
