Ahead of a possible rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden in 2024, Democrats in the battleground state of Wisconsin are calling attention to the collapsed plan for 13,000 manufacturing jobs in the state, which had been much touted by Trump’s White House in 2017 as a success for his “America First” agenda.
In a press call celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairman Ben Wikler recalled the drastic scaling back of Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn’s plans for a manufacturing plant and thousands of jobs in Wisconsin.
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“Just this week, the biggest failure of the Trump-[former Wisconsin Gov. Scott] Walker era, Foxconn announced it would sell two properties in Green Bay and Eau Claire, abandoning plans that would have brought over 500 jobs to the Badger State,” he told reporters.
The Foxconn Wisconsin deal was announced by Trump’s administration in 2017 and heralded as a sign of tech manufacturing revival in the United States. However, In 2021, it was revealed that the company was reducing its investment in the state, cutting the promised $10 billion to $672 million. Instead of 13,000 new jobs, there would be 1,454. The proposed 20-million-square-foot manufacturing campus never came to fruition. The construction of the campus would have been historic, going down as the largest investment in a new location from a foreign-based company.
“For years, Scott Walker and Donald Trump made empty promises about bringing new jobs home to our state [and] about rebuilding our state’s infrastructure. All of those promises went unfulfilled,” Wikler said.
He added, “The contrast between the failures of the Trump-Walker era and the job growth and record on record low unemployment numbers for our state that we’ve experienced under the Biden-Harris and [Gov. Tony] Evers [D-WI] administrations could not be more stark.”
The company’s collapsed investment in the state is also being pointed to by the Democratic National Committee and Biden’s campaign as an example of a lack of follow-through from Republican front-runner Trump. The two are also using the event as evidence of Trump’s inability to handle the economy.
DNC National press secretary Ammar Moussa recalled the scaled-back deal in a post to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter on Wednesday. “I still remember when Donald Trump promised tens of thousands of Foxconn jobs in Wisconsin. What a colossal failure,” he wrote.
“Wisconsinites remember when Donald Trump promised 13,000 manufacturing jobs and a new Foxconn plant to their state. They also remember when that never happened,” Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “President Biden has succeeded where the former president failed American families, including by helping create nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs that actually exist throughout the country and more than doubling the construction of new manufacturing plants. Republicans want to send those jobs back overseas so they can cut taxes for the super-rich. Voters in Wisconsin rejected the extreme, divisive MAGA agenda in 2020, and they rejected the MAGA attacks on choice just this year in their Supreme Court election. They will reject it again in 2024.”
While several economic markers have improved during Biden’s administration, voters still believe the U.S. economy is not doing well, according to a New York Times-Siena poll conducted last month. More than half of those surveyed, 58%, rated U.S. economic conditions as poor. This is despite declining inflation and an unemployment rate nearing a 50-year low.
The economy is considered the most important issue in 2024 by voters.
Asked how Democrats plan to convince voters in Wisconsin that Biden is capable to better handle the economy than Trump, Wikler pointed to “the contrast between” the Biden administration, which “has passed bill after bill, bipartisan bills,” and the Foxconn deal that was promoted by Trump.
“I think that really tells the story. It’s about building the economy from the middle out and the ground up instead of the trickle-down, Foxconn-style development where you hand over a giant amount of money to a poor, unknown company that never actually built something,” he explained.
Neither Trump’s campaign nor the Wisconsin Republican Party responded to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment.
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Wisconsin will be a key state in the 2024 presidential contest. In 2016, Trump took the state in a shock to his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He beat her 47.2% to 46.5%. In 2020, though, Biden overtook Trump in the state, 49.4% to 48.8%.
In a June poll from Marquette University Law School, 52% said they would vote for Biden, while 43% would choose Trump. In a matchup with Trump’s biggest opponent in the 2024 GOP primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), 49% reported they would vote for Biden, and 47% said they would vote for DeSantis.
