President Trump’s economic nationalist fight against Chinese dominance is the “number one issue” driving Hispanic voters to back the president in the 2020 presidential election, a campaign official says.
In a statement to Time Magazine, a Trump campaign official revealed that above every other issue, the administration’s fight against China is the most motivating issue for Hispanic voters who are on the fence about supporting the president in his re-election bid.
Time noted:
[The campaign is] also testing how to pitch Latino voters in New Mexico and Nevada on Trump’s Chinese tariffs. “The No. 1 issue driving Latino voters to like him and support him is his fight against China,” a senior campaign official says, adding that the campaign is working to figure out why that’s an animating issue. [Emphasis added]
This year, Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel imports, a ten percent tariff on aluminum imports, and recently hiked tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports to 25 percent. Likewise, the Trump administration is reviewing hiking tariffs on an additional $300 billion worth of Chinese imports to 25 percent.
In recent polling by Harvard/Harris, though a majority of Hispanic voters said they opposed the hiking of tariffs on China, more than 2-in-5 said they supported the initiative. Meanwhile, more than 45 percent of Hispanic voters said they supported imposing a 25 percent tariff on an additional $300 billion in Chinese imports.
States with sizeable Hispanic populations have suffered mass job layoffs due to the United States’ trade deficit with China. California, with the third largest Hispanic population in the country, has had at least 562,000 jobs displaced due to free trade with China, according to the latest Economic Policy Institute analysis.
Likewise, Texas has had at least 314,000 jobs displaced due to the U.S. trade deficit with China, while Nevada has had nearly 16,000 jobs displaced and New Mexico has seen at least 12,800 jobs displaced.
The leading Democrat presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, has scoffed at the threat of China to the American economy.
“They’re not competition for us,” Biden said last month.
Biden has continued to defend his support of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which eliminated nearly five million manufacturing jobs from the American economy and resulted in the closure of about 50,000 manufacturing plants.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.