Kamala to oppose Nippon Steel's $15bn bid for US Steel

US vice president Kamala Harris is set to say that US Steel should remain owned and managed by Americans during a visit to Pennsylvania on Monday, according to an official from her campaign, dealing the latest blow to Nippon Steel’s hopes of buying the company. 

Harris’s expected comments about a proposed foreign takeover of US Steel echo US President Joe Biden’s own opposition to the deal with Nippon Steel. However they have new significance since Harris, Biden’s vice-president, is now the Democratic nominee for president.

Kamala will make the comments in the city of Pittsburgh, as she celebrates the Labor Day holiday and courts blue-collar union votes in two critical industrial swing states. Before travelling to Pennsylvania on Monday, Harris will make a stop in Michigan.

“The vice-president is expected to say that US Steel should remain domestically owned and operated and stress her commitment to always have the backs of American steel workers,” a Harris campaign official said on Monday.

Nippon Steel’s planned $15bn acquisition of US Steel has faced a bipartisan political backlash, as populist economics and the protection of domestic manufacturing replace the US’s long-standing consensus in favour of open investment.

Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee for the White House, has also vowed to block Nippon Steel’s US Steel bid.

The Japanese group has hired Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state under Trump, to lobby in favour of the deal, and pledged to ramp up its investment in US Steel facilities if the transaction is completed. The statement from Harris, however, will complicate that push.

Harris has gained the endorsement of most of the key US labour unions, which are a powerful constituency within the Democratic party and help rally voters in battleground states.

Both the United Steel Workers and the United Auto Workers have backed Harris since she entered the race.

While union leaders are strongly in favour of Harris, and have repeatedly attacked Trump as a phoney champion of the working class, the vice-president is still facing a battle to win over rank-and-file union members who have drifted towards the Republican party in recent years.

One exception to Harris’s support in organised labour is the Teamsters Union, which represents 1.3mn members including truck drivers and construction workers. It has declined to endorse a presidential candidate so far.

Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, spoke at the Republican convention in July, but suggested he was open to backing Harris if she sat for an interview with him.

According to the FT’s polling tracker, Harris leads Trump nationally by 3.7 percentage points with little more than two months to go before election day.

She holds narrow leads in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania, which should be sufficient to win the presidency, while Trump has a slight edge in other battleground states including North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.