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Joe Biden’s energy secretary said the US election came “a year early” for Americans to feel the benefits of sweeping efforts to boost domestic manufacturing as she praised the Trump campaign for listening to the concerns of blue-collar communities.
Jennifer Granholm suggested that Democrats had failed to fully engage with local communities in the US industrial Midwest, where a “sense of despair” had taken root following the closure of large swaths of industry over recent decades.
“If you’re not from these communities . . . it’s not the first thing you think about,” she told the Financial Times. “And I think it has to be top of mind for people.”
Granholm’s comments came as Democrats debate the way forward for the party after it lost all three branches of government as Donald Trump’s Republicans swept to victory in last month’s election.
On Thursday, Democratic party leaders met in Washington to start the process of electing a new chair.
The Biden administration passed landmark legislation that has spurred hundreds of billions of dollars in investments aimed at rejuvenating US manufacturing after years of neglect. But Granholm conceded that many voters had yet to feel the effects.
“I think we were a year early, almost, to be able to see [the impact],” she said in an interview. “The notion of feeling it, seeing steel on the ground, seeing people being hired, it’s still a little early.
“It’s close to 950 factories that have announced they’re either expanding or coming. And a lot of those are announcements or they are groundbreakings — but they’re not ribbon cuttings.”
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act, both signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022, were designed to revitalise American industry and reverse an exodus of manufacturing jobs by providing more than $400bn in support for green industries and semiconductor production, potentially creating more than 135,000 jobs..
But with projects taking time to come to fruition, Democrats were unable to capitalise on the boom during the presidential election. Instead, their benefit will be felt after Trump has taken office.
“When people start to see factories go up, that makes a huge difference,” said Granholm, a former governor of Michigan, a state hit hard by the decline of American manufacturing. “Trump is going to come in at a time when all of that’s going to happen and he’ll be able to take credit for a lot of that.”
“What I think the Trump team got right is that they’re listening to people in remote places and people in communities where one factory is torn down and the whole community dies,” she added.
Granholm also urged the incoming administration to take a measured approach to tariffs to avoid sparking a global trade war.
Trump has vowed to impose hefty tariffs of 25 per cent on Canada and Mexico and impose an additional 10 per cent on top of existing Chinese tariffs.
“I think you have to approach the tariff question with a scalpel and not with an axe,” said Granholm, repudiating the idea of “blanket tariffs”.
She added: “President Biden has looked at tariffs in a very strategic way, without alienating our allies . . . and we want to make sure that continues because that helps America. So I just think it has to be done extremely carefully.”
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