Before Mrs. Clinton’s speech, Mr. Trump used an address to the National Association of Home Builders in Miami Beach to assail former President Bill Clinton for signing Nafta into law, which Mr. Trump said devastated upstate New York, and he hammered Mrs. Clinton for failing to deliver on a promise she made in her 2000 Senate campaign to bring 200,000 jobs to the state.

“She passed no legislation that helped,” he said. “She couldn’t get out of her own way.”

Mrs. Clinton gave her address after touring the Futuramic Tool & Engineering factory in Warren, which made automotive parts in the past but has diversified to supply parts to the aerospace industry. Praising the company for being at the front line of a potential “manufacturing renaissance,” Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Trump for taking a dark view of America’s potential.

“When Donald Trump visited Detroit on Monday, he talked only of failure, poverty and crime,” she said. “He’s missing so much.”

Mrs. Clinton has spent over a year explaining her main economic proposals and did not propose anything new on Thursday. But she did contrast her specific promises with those Mr. Trump offered on Monday.

She mocked Mr. Trump’s plan to give tax breaks for child care — the brainchild of his daughter Ivanka and intended to appeal to middle-class mothers — as a boon to rich families with nannies. And, in contrast to Mr. Trump’s corporate tax reductions, she said she would impose an “exit tax” to penalize companies that move jobs overseas and offer tax incentives to companies that share profits with employees.

“Then there’s the estate tax, which Trump wants to eliminate altogether,” she said. “If you believe that he’s as wealthy as he says, that alone would save the Trump family $4 billion.”

But on one issue that has resonated with working-class voters, Mrs. Clinton played defense on Thursday.