DETROIT — Just about every other truck that was coming or going from the Stellantis Mack Assembly plant on Jean Avenue used a honk or a thumbs-up to greet an assembled group standing on the corner of Jean and Mack holding “Autoworkers for Trump” signs.

However, not every reaction included a thumb, explained Don Shreves, who took a half-day off of work to attend the local rally. “There were occasional fingers as well,” he said, smiling. “We just wave back and tell them not to be a hater.”

Shreves has worked in the auto industry since 1986, and at 65, he’s still there as a product design engineer. Like many kids from western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, where his family hailed from, he went to college to be an engineer “because we knew we would be building things and someone had to design them,” he explained.

Shreves was attending his third of a series of nine consecutive Autoworkers for Trump mini-rallies organized by Brian Pannebecker, a retired union autoworker who has become a sort of point man in the working-class movement here after President Donald Trump called him up onstage not once but twice in his visits here.

Shreves was among a couple of dozen autoworkers from union and nonunion shops and retirees who feel compelled to do their part to encourage support for the former president and his vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).

The band of supporters, waving signs and talking to anyone who walked past the busy intersection, was standing just 18 miles as the crow flies from another Stellantis plant in Warren, where workers just got the word on Friday that as many as 2,450 of them will be laid off beginning the first week of October.

The plant is where the Ram truck is produced. Stellantis’s chief executive, Carlos Tavares, said the company needed to cut costs because the factory was operating at an unsatisfactory level.

Michigan is in the hot seat in this year’s presidential election — and working-class voters like the men and women who attended this rally, especially those who live and work in Macomb County, hold the ticket to who will win this race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump won Macomb County in 2016 and 2020. In 2020, though, he won the county by a lesser margin, which helped tip the scales for Biden statewide. A similar scenario hurt Trump in Pennsylvania. Since then, Trump has been laser focused on both states in key counties such as Macomb and Kent, trying to push that turnout number for him to exceed his 2016 numbers.

During Trump’s presidency, the number of auto manufacturing jobs held steady, adding more than 34,000 jobs from January 2017 to February 2020 before the impact of COVID shutdowns hit, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Shreves, the son of a union tradesman who grew up in Nutter’s Fort, West Virginia, said Trump inspired the middle-class voters who have been so negatively affected by inflation.

He grows weary of Democrats staking the claim that they support the middle class.

“When I was coming up in West Virginia, the Republicans were the party of the elite and the Democrats were the party of the common man,” he said. “And I’ve joked it took one of the world’s wealthiest men to turn that on its head. I can’t even understand how Democrats ceded that [advantage] yet still try to claim it.”

“From where I sit and experience life in my community and in my job, the Republicans are more for the common man and for America working its way up into the upper class,” he said. “And the Democrats are for the elites, rewarding those that have already gotten there.”

He said he laughed when he heard that Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) tried to pin elitism on Vance because the latter punched his way up and attended Yale.

“If you’ve been to the town where J.D. Vance is from, Middletown, and I have, you would laugh at that characterization. Heck, when I saw he called his grandmother and grandfather ‘Mamaw’ and ‘Papaw,’ that caused me to laugh because that’s what I called my dad’s mom and dad, Mamaw and Papaw,” he said of his own Appalachian roots.

Retired United Auto Workers Local 400 member Denise Acciacca, who worked for Ford as a bumper trimmer, high-low driver, and area coordinator for over 30 years until her plant shut down, said she recognized that Democrats didn’t have the working man or woman’s back a long time ago.

“As far back as 1978, when I got hired back at Ford’s, I was 18 years old, and ever since I can remember, our jobs have been leaving the plants and it always happened under the Democrats’ watch,” she said.

Acciacca remembers having over 3,000 people working at her now-shuttered plant at one time.

“Many of the jobs went out to Mexico and we lost so many jobs,” she said. “And the Democrats always said, ‘Well, for every job we lose, we’re going to bring another one in.’ Well, that never happened. It never happened. So they’re not for the working people. I just believe they’re all padding their pockets.”

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Pannebecker, who is a retired UAW member and runs the Autoworkers for Trump rallies, said all he wants to hear from Trump from now until Election Day is him talking about always putting the interest of the working class first in everything he does.

“If he keeps mentioning that, he will win,” Pannebecker said. “People don’t understand that the Republican Party is the party that best represents the working class, and honestly telling us every day we come first is all he should be talking about.”