Manufacturing — that is, the business of making stuff — has changed significantly over the past half-century. Perhaps you’ve noticed. While America’s share of industry has constricted, with fewer people needed to perform the same amount of work as in the past, it’s not quite time to start eulogizing.

But the way the presidential candidates have been talking about reviving manufacturing jobs has not been very enlightening, and in some cases they have been willfully obtuse. Their statements are meant to appeal to disaffected workers, but they both oversimplify the problems and ignore the real source of trouble.

Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to American workers from abroad. “They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs,” Mr. Trump said in his campaign announcement speech in June. (He neglected to mention that his own line of neckties is fabricated in China.)

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, seems to regularly misconstrue the state of American manufacturing — more than any other candidate. At the undercard debate in Milwaukee on Nov. 10, Mr. Huckabee explained that the United States has lost five million manufacturing jobs since 2000: “The reason they don’t have jobs is because their jobs are in Mexico, they’re in China, they’re in Indonesia,” he said, referring to American workers. While that is certainly true for some of the jobs lost, outsourcing is not the main driver of domestic job loss.