Visualizing the Impact of Chinese Tariffs on U.S. Counties by their 2024 vote share

This article sources data and analysis presented in China's retaliatory tariffs will hurt Trump-voting counties most by Robert Maxim, Mark Muro, and Shriya Methkupally from the Brookings Institution.

China's retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. are projected to hit counties that supported Trump in the 2024 election the hardest. This is, of course, by design. The original Brookings article identified the industries most vulnerable to these tariffs and mapped them to counties along with 2024 employment figures.

This article builds on that work by incorporating additional data: the 2024 presidential election outcomes for each county and statewide employment totals in the affected industries, sourced from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Visualizing the Impact

The visualization below shows the distribution of potentially affected jobs across U.S. counties due to Chinese retaliatory tariffs, along with the relationship between Trump's 2024 vote share and the number of jobs at risk. Counties that gave Trump higher levels of support tend to have more jobs in industries targeted by the retaliatory tariffs.

As the original article points out, "two-thirds of all jobs in affected industries reside in Trump-voting counties"

This chart below shows total employment in industries targeted by Chinese tariffs, aggregated at the state level. States with large energy and manufacturing sectors, such as California, Texas, and Florida, have the highest numbers of at-risk jobs. The list of industries on the left can be used to filter the results and view employment patterns within specific sectors like petroleum, natural gas, coal mining, and vehicle manufacturing.