The communities most at risk to retaliatory tariffs are rural areas, especially those in Republican districts.

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Roanoke, VA (Cardinal News)

An analysis of the industries that China, Canada and the European Union are targeting finds that in some Virginia communities, more than 20% of the jobs are at risk. Buena Vista ranks as the most at risk with 28%.

The localities with the most jobs at risk from retaliatory tariffs are almost entirely in rural areas, according to a New York Times analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

That distribution reflects two intertwined trends: That's where manufacturing jobs tend to be. Rural areas also overwhelmingly vote Republican, and multiple news organizations have reported that the retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada, China and the European Union have attempted to target industries in Republican districts in hopes that Republican officeholders will pressure the Trump administration to reverse course.

The New York Times recently compiled a map of where those retaliatory tariffs will hit hardest, based on the number of jobs in those industries, then it overlaid that with election results. What it found was that Republican-voting localities -- primarily rural counties and small cities -- are on the front lines of any trade war if the tit-for-tat tariffs continue.

Nationwide, the state most vulnerable is Wisconsin, where 9.5% of the jobs are potentially touched by retaliatory tariffs, followed by Indiana and Iowa at 8.5% and 8.4%, but those statewide numbers mask the wide regional disparities within states between urban and rural areas.

Virginia provides a good example. Overall, just 3.8% of the jobs in the Old Dominion are in industries targeted by retaliatory tariffs, one of the lowest figures in the country. However, those industries are clustered in the Alleghany Highlands, Southwest Virginia and parts of the Shenandoah Valley and Southside. Or, in other words, the 5th, 6th and 9th congressional districts represented by Republicans John McGuire, Ben Cline and Morgan Griffith.

Even within those districts, there are further disparities. For instance, in the 6th District, only 1% of the jobs in Highland County are in fields that might be affected by tariffs. In the 5th District, Appomattox County is also at just 1%. In the 9th District, Craig County comes in at less than 1%. Certain localities, though, are 20 times or more likely to have jobs that could be jeopardized by retaliatory tariffs -- or, if you prefer, more than six times the state average.

The locality in Virginia deemed most at risk is Buena Vista, a small manufacturing city where 28% of the jobs -- 900 -- are potentially impacted by retaliatory tariffs, The New York Times report found.

About an hour's drive to the west is Covington, where 23% of the jobs -- another 900 -- are at risk of retaliatory tariffs. That's because Covington's main industry is the WestRock paper mill, and paper products are among those that other countries are hitting with retaliatory tariffs.

The New York Times report stressed that the job numbers reflect the number of jobs in industries targeted by retaliatory tariffs, not that those are how many jobs would be lost. Still, they are deemed "at risk" if the trade war results in other countries buying fewer of their American-made goods. And for those of you skeptical of The New York Times, just a gentle reminder that all the paper did was crunch some federal data. Anyone with a big enough computer could have done this.

In terms of the sheer number of jobs, the place in Virginia most at risk is Newport News, where The New York Times analysis of federal jobs data found 23% of the jobs -- 26,900 -- could be touched by retaliatory tariffs. The report did not detail which industries helped put which communities higher on the list. Newport News is well-known for shipbuilding. However, the shipyards don't build ships for foreign customers, so it's unclear why the risk factor here is deemed to be so high. Newport News is also the rare exception in The New York Times analysis: It's a Democratic-voting city with a high-risk factor.

The philosophical goal behind tariffs is to discourage Americans from buying foreign-made products and instead encourage domestic manufacturing, although the catch is that tariffs hit now, while reshoring manufacturing, as it's often called, is a longer-term process. For example: President Donald Trump has imposed tariffs on foreign imports of steel and aluminum. That immediately drives up the price for any American companies using those products, while it could take several years to build a steel plant. Trump has said there will be a "transition period," but the question is how patient American consumers -- and voters -- will be. The fact that many of the workers most at risk from retaliatory tariffs are in Trump-voting counties could both help him politically (they may be more willing to trust his judgment) or hurt him (they may wonder why their candidate's policies have resulted in their jobs being at risk).

Rural areas are also the most dependent on the federal government for funding; see our previous reports on overall government funding and school funding, in particular. That means rural communities are the most vulnerable to any negative consequences of Trump's actions, but they have also been the most politically supportive of him up until now. In many parts of rural Virginia, it's not unusual for Trump's vote share to top 70% and sometimes 80%.

The opportunity for Trump is that he may have the chance to make fundamental changes in American trade patterns and American government without any real political blowback because the people who will endure the most pain are his own supporters and they may still stand with him. Trump voters in some of these communities may also feel they have no real option if they continue to find Democrats distasteful; a recent CNN poll found that voters' views of the Democratic Party are at an all-time low. The danger for Trump is that he's misjudged the moment and finds that voters who thought he'd make prices go down after years of Biden-era inflation, start to rebel when prices go even higher. High prices are bad; high prices and job losses are even worse.

None of us know how this will play out. All we do know is where the risk factors are.

The New York Times analysis found seven cities or counties in Virginia where 20% or more of the jobs were targeted by retaliatory tariffs. Of those, six are Republican-voting communities, with Newport News being the only exception.

In all, there are 28 localities in Virginia where The New York Times analysis found 10% or more of the community's jobs at risk from tariffs. Besides Newport News, Emporia and Hopewell were the only other places that routinely vote Democratic. The remaining 25 communities all vote strongly Republican and are primarily rural.

For those with long political memories in Virginia, the names of two of the three localities at the top of the "at risk" list -- Buena Vista and Covington -- stand out. Those were once solidly Democratic cities where the party's candidates visited every Labor Day for a traditional series of rallies. Over the years, both of those places have slipped from Democrats' grasp and now vote for Republicans at higher rates than they ever did for Democrats. Can Democrats use the current economic uncertainty to regain any lost ground with working-class voters? We'll see. One test will be whether they can find a way to relate to voters in those two cities in a way they haven't for several decades now. I'll have more to say about how the political left is fumbling its response to Trump's tariffs in a future column. For now, let's stick to The New York Times numbers and move down the list:

Three localities in Virginia have 21% of their jobs jeopardized by tariffs, according to the analysis: Accomack County (3,200 jobs), Buchanan County (1,300 jobs) and Henry County (3,600). Dickenson County is just behind them at 20%, or 700 jobs.

Why do they rank so high?

Accomack County is Virginia's top soybean producer, and foreign governments know to target farmers because farmers tend to be pretty Republican. Buchanan and Dickenson are coal counties. Henry County is more general manufacturing.

Other counties that score high for risk are those where the major industries are poultry (Augusta County, Rockingham County, Shenandoah County and Page County in the Shenandoah Valley) or forest products (Alleghany County, Charlotte County, Halifax County and Lunenburg County). All those counties were listed as having 10% to 17% of their jobs at risk.

The localities at the least risk are those with little to no manufacturing. In Virginia, Arlington County, Fairfax city, Fairfax County and Falls Church have less than 1% of their jobs that are potentially impacted by tariffs, according to The New York Times analysis. They may have to worry about Trump's government cuts, but they are relatively immune to the trade war. The front lines for that run through Buena Vista and Covington, not Ballston and Chantilly.

This story is provided as a service of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ On the Ground news wire. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) is a network of more than 475 independent, nonprofit newsrooms serving communities throughout the US, Canada, and globally. On the Ground is a service of INN, which aggregates the best of its members’ elections and political content, and provides it free for republication. Read more about INN here: https://inn.org/.

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