Charles Johnson was only supposed to be stuck home for about a week. His manufacturing plant, which makes aluminum parts for Ford pickup trucks, shut its doors in March, like many others in Michigan, to arrest the spread of the novel coronavirus.
A week lapsed into a month, after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) closed most businesses statewide. Out of a job for the foreseeable future, and running out of cash, the 46-year-old Johnson joined the ranks of more than 1 million Michigan workers seeking help in a state that’s faced immense economic hardship amid a deadly pandemic.
“Almost everybody I know is out of work, or working only a couple of hours a week,” Johnson said. He described his own bank account as “pretty low,” although he’s managing to scrape by.
Roughly a quarter of Michigan’s eligible workforce is now trying to obtain unemployment aid, according to local officials, a staggering example of the economic carnage wrought by the coronavirus in a state that’s no stranger to financial struggle.
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Four years ago, Trump narrowly won Michigan — flipping a dozen counties from blue to red — by wooing local voters who felt they were struggling financially. Since then, though, companies including General Motors and U.S. Steel have proceeded with plans to close local plants. Trump’s trade policies, and the tariffs he’s imposed, have further compounded workers’ woes, experts say.
The layoffs in Michigan and other swing states threaten to drive voters — facing the prospect of being out of a job indefinitely — to use the ballot box to exact revenge on those they see as responsible for their financial misfortune.
“The president has a big problem,” said Dennis Darnoi, a Republican strategist and founder of Densar Consulting in Michigan. “The more it can be laid at his feet, that we knew it was coming, that he dawdled — he’s going to lose votes in this state, and he doesn’t numerically have the freedom to do that.”
