Donald J. Trump visited the Detroit Economic Club last month to tell a story about a once-great city destroyed by free trade.

“The city of Detroit is the living, breathing example of my opponent’s failed economic agenda,” Mr. Trump said. “She supports the high taxes and radical regulation that forced jobs out of your community, and the crime policies have made you far, far less safe.” He concluded: “She is the candidate of the past. Ours is the campaign of the future.”

In fact, Mr. Trump is the candidate of Michigan’s past, which is one reason he’s losing the state in almost every survey. When he talks about making Michigan great again, he is evoking the years between World War II and the 1973 oil crisis, when an auto industry job that paid for a house, two cars and a cottage Up North was, in the words of the author and automaker Ben Hamper, a “precious birthright.”

Like much of Mr. Trump’s nostalgic campaign, his promise to keep manufacturing jobs in America seems better suited for the attitudes — and the voters — of the 1980s. Back then, Michigan was in a xenophobic mood, especially toward the Japanese, who were often doing a better job of building the fuel-efficient cars Americans wanted to drive. In a suburb of Detroit, a Chinese-American man was beaten to death in a bar brawl by a Chrysler foreman who told him, “It’s because of you we’re out of work.” In Flint, people at a United Automobile Workers fund-raising event paid $5 to whack a Toyota with a sledgehammer.