GRAND RAPIDS (WWJ) -- Michigan received yet another major political visit on Wednesday — the second in as many weeks — from Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance.
During a campaign stop in Byron Center — an unincorporated community south of Grand Rapids in Kent County — Vance spoke before supporters at a trucking company.
The Ohio senator said economic and energy polices from the Biden/Harris administration are hurting small town Michiganders.
"I grew up in a town not all that different from Byron Center," he said, "and I watched in my own community as jobs were sent overseas. And of course, it's not just people's checkbooks that suffer when they lose a good manufacturing job or they lose a job in any industry."
"I remember seeing friends whose parents never fought, but started to have their marriages unravel from financial stress from a lost job. I saw families torn apart as China built its middle class on the back of the American middle class."
Vance went on to say that Trump's Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, "pretends" to stand for regular folks. "But it is normal Americans, we know this, who suffer the most when politicians like Kamala Harris fail to do their job," he said.
Vance said the U.S. is the greatest country in the word, that the American dream is still alive, and that he and Trump will fight to protect it and to build upon it.
As for a plan to get this done, Vance said energy policy would play heavily into it.
"Instead of buying energy from every dictator around the globe — which is what Kamala Harris wants to do — under President Trump we're gonna embraces a very simple principle: We're gonna get American energy from American workers in American territory," he said, to much applause, "We are going to drill, baby, drill!"
"That's gonna cut down prices, and that's gonna create a lot of prosperity for the American people," Vance added.
While Trump has sought to cast Biden’s climate and clean energy policies as choking off U.S. oil and gas production, the numbers show that output of both of those fuels reached record levels in 2023.
According to the U.S. Department of Interior report released at the beginning of this year, President Joe Biden had approved nearly 50% more oil and gas drilling permits for wells on federal land by that point than former President Donald Trump did in his first three years in office.
Then, just last week, U.S. oil production hit a record of 13.4 million barrels per day, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.
This is Vance's third trip to Michigan since becoming Trump's running mate.
Vice President Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, held a massive rally last week at Detroit Metro Airport, and campaigned at a UAW hall in Wayne.