A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that China used targeted trade war tariffs to specifically interfere with the political outcomes of the U.S. House of Representatives 2018 election.
NBER published “The Consumption Response to Trade Shocks: Evidence from the US-China Trade War” to analyze the effect of China’s 2017 to 2018 trade strategies on changes for individual consumption in United States counties. The results demonstrate that through targeted retaliatory tariffs, China caused a “3.8 percentage point decline in consumption growth” in election competitive U.S. “battleground” counties.
