Politics

Trump’s tariff gambit doesn’t seem to have done much for the Pennsylvania special election

By Philip Bump March 12 at 2:31 PM

It’s almost certainly not a coincidence that President Trump decided to announce new tariffs on steel imports shortly before Tuesday’s special election in southwestern Pennsylvania. The area, near Pittsburgh, is part of the Rust Belt, theoretically the sort of blue-collar industrial area that Trump sees as central to his political base. There was some speculation that Trump was announcing his planned tariffs only to boost Republican candidate Rick Saccone’s chances in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District; either way, it’s clear that Trump saw the tariffs as something that would appeal to voters there.

“A lot of steel mills are now opening up because of what I did,” the president said of his introduction of tariffs. This is certainly a questionable claim.

But, more broadly, it’s questionable as a sales pitch. When Trump announced last year that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, he said he was doing so because he was defending Pittsburgh, not Paris. It was a reminder that he sees Pittsburgh and the broader area around the city as though nothing had changed since the late 1970s. At the time of the announcement, we noted that manufacturing jobs in the region pale next to jobs in, for example, health care or renewable energy. Trump is making a sales pitch to a southwestern Pennsylvania that largely no longer exists.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the sales pitch didn’t really work. A new poll in the 18th District from Monmouth University shows that Democrat Conor Lamb has a slight lead over Saccone and that Trump’s tariffs announcement didn’t do much to change that.
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Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York. Follow @pbump