Republicans across the country are campaigning on a promise to create good-paying jobs. On Tuesday, the American workers they are promising to help will take a hit from a trade war their party’s president started.
Canada imposes sweeping dollar-for-dollar tariffs on roughly $20 billion in American goods on Tuesday, matching the 50% tariffs President Donald Trump placed on Canadian imports in August. Prime Minister Mark Carney called off a last-ditch effort to head off the escalation, saying U.S. negotiators had proposed terms that were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”
The states in the blast radius are among November’s most contested. Michigan, Ohio, Maine and Texas collectively exported roughly $78 billion in goods to Canada in 2025. All have Republicans in tight, high-stakes Senate races.
With negotiations with Canada effectively nonexistant, economists say the impact will be felt within weeks.
“It takes a while for the Canadian consumers to feel the higher prices, but the impacts on the producers … the harm is probably already being felt,” Wendong Zhang, an associate professor of economics at Cornell University, told MS NOW.
Some of the Republicans on those ballots have spent the past year defending the policy now arriving in their states. Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers has named “bringing manufacturing jobs” as a campaign priority, and has called Trump’s tariffs “necessary.” Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, who has made “Made in Ohio” a centerpiece of his platform, recently appeared alongside Vice President JD Vance at a steel plant to praise the administration’s economic agenda.
Others have spent recent months opposing the president’s Canada trade war. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — the only Republican senator seeking reelection in a state Trump lost in 2024, and facing Democrat Troy Jackson in a race MS NOW rates a toss-up — has voted repeatedly to halt the tariffs and called the latest round a mistake.
The tariffs land on a manufacturing sector already under strain. After growing in the post-pandemic years under President Joe Biden, U.S. manufacturing has shed more than 60,000 jobs since January 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and Census Bureau figures show private spending on new factory construction has fallen by more than half over the same period.
That downturn was already a central concern for Republican candidates this cycle. Husted is defending his seat against former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who has argued that getting aggressive with an economic adversary like China is one thing and imposing unpredictable tariffs on a neighbor is another. Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP nominee for governor in Ohio, has called for a “second industrial revolution” in the state.
Ottawa, meanwhile, has shown it is choosing its targets with some care. Days after announcing the retaliation list, Canada removed roughly $1.1 billion in American fish and seafood from it, citing feedback from its own fishing industry, and added about the same value of other U.S. goods in their place. The reversal spared two states with competitive Senate races. Maine, which would have been the most exposed state in the country with 34% of its exports to Canada affected, saw that share fall to 12%. Alaska’s dropped to less than 1%.
A quick solution to the escalation seems unlikely. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer insisted that the Trump administration gave Canada “the best deal in the world” during a Fox News interview Friday, and said the future of a deal is “in Canada’s corner.” Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, said Canada had “ripped off” and “taken advantage of” the U.S. for years. His response to Ottawa’s defiance has ranged from renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” to falsely claiming U.S. banks can’t do business in Canada (they can, and do).
The trade war, which began in March 2025 with Trump’s first round of tariffs, has already caused major harm to U.S. businesses. When Alberta and Saskatchewan lifted boycotts on American alcohol imports earlier this year, Zhang said Canadian retailers ordered 65% less U.S. wine than before, a “permanent erosion” in market share that significantly hit producers in California, New York and Washington state.
The same pattern could spread to other goods categories. In the year after Trump took office, Canada increased its non-U.S. imports by 12.4% while it decreased U.S. imports by 2.9%. If Canadians further reduce U.S. imports like automobiles during the tariff period, carmakers risk the loss of thousands of customers north of the border, which could mean workforce reductions and plant closures stateside.
Americans could pay more, too. Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, told MS NOW that cars are getting more expensive to produce because parts sometimes cross the border multiple times during assembly, squeezing dealership margins nationwide. To make up for those losses, dealerships have raised prices in other areas.
“You may make less money selling the car or selling the SUV, but you make up for it by charging more for services,” Miller said.
The American Automotive Policy Council, a trade group representing manufacturing giants General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, is pushing the Trump administration to restart talks with Canada. In a statement to MS NOW, AAPC President Matt Blunt said the organization is urging “U.S. and Canadian negotiators to reach a deal that enhances North American auto competitiveness and brings about a successful USMCA review.”
Even if the Trump administration fully de-escalates tensions with Canada before the midterms, economists say U.S. exports are unlikely to rebound completely to pre-tariff levels. Tariffs, said Miller, “hurt long-term U.S. export competitiveness.”
“The concern is that this continual uncertainty about trade policy, this continual tariff onslaught, it basically causes companies to say, ‘You know what, I’m just not going to deal as much with the United States,’” Miller told MS NOW.
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