--- title: "Across the St. Clair River, a Candidate Learns What Tariffs Cost" description: "Down in the polls, with tariffs costing $5,619 per Michigan household, Mike Rogers turns on Trump’s Canada trade war" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-15T09:30:00Z modified: 2026-10-15T16:23:21Z url: https://rews.cc/a/across-the-st-clair-river-a-candidate-learns-what-tariffs-co-723583 language: en tags: ["tariffs", "economy", "politics", "trump", "michigan", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Across the St. Clair River, a Candidate Learns What Tariffs Cost *Down in the polls, with tariffs costing $5,619 per Michigan household, Mike Rogers turns on Trump’s Canada trade war* By Jan Sokol · October 15, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/across-the-st-clair-river-a-candidate-learns-what-tariffs-co-723583 ## In brief - Michigan households paid $5,619 on average from Trump’s second-term tariffs, the highest of any state, per the NTUF - Two recent polls found over 60% of Michigan voters oppose Trump’s Canada tariffs - Mike Rogers reversed his position in an Oct. 7 ad after calling the August tariffs “necessary” - Democrat Abdul El-Sayed leads Rogers by 2.7 points on average ahead of the Nov. 3 election - Four Michigan bridges carry more than 40% of US-Canada truck traffic From a store window in Port Huron you can see Canada. The St. Clair River slides past, narrow and indifferent, and on the far bank sits Sarnia, Ontario, close enough that a shopkeeper named Whitican, 62, motioned through the glass toward it while explaining his troubles. “We used to get a lot of Canadian customers. They’re right there,” [he told the Boston Globe’s Jim Puzzanghera](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/10/15/nation/michigan-senate-tariffs-rogers-el-sayed/). “They’ve been like our brothers my whole life. They didn’t do anything.” The brothers have stopped coming, and the reason has a name and an address in Washington. The affordability crisis — inflamed by President Trump’s second-term tariffs and by the steep fuel prices of the Iran war — has upended finances across the United States, but the Canadian tariffs, including a new round Trump levied this summer, have landed on Michigan with particular weight. Weight enough to become the central issue in the state’s pivotal US Senate race. That race has placed the Republican candidate, former US representative Mike Rogers, in a vise. He must not antagonize a president who has belittled Canada, mused about annexing it as the 51st state, and ordered the federal government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Yet he must win a state whose economy is stitched to Canada’s — a state where, as the debate between Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed showed, [the insults lately outnumber the answers](https://rews.cc/a/in-grand-rapids-rogers-and-el-sayed-fight-over-iran-canada-a-4bbea5). Republican Senate candidates in New Hampshire and Maine — two other northern border states with tight races, and in Maine’s case [a trade war that has already killed a $300m salmon farm](https://rews.cc/a/the-salmon-farm-tariffs-killed-is-now-campaigning-against-su-037ea6) — were quick to criticize the new Canadian tariffs. Rogers chose the Trump-friendly path. Last winter he backed Trump when the president threatened to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, the newest crossing over the Detroit River. After Trump implemented the latest Canadian tariffs in August, Rogers called them “necessary,” arguing the tariffs have overall been a positive for the nation. At an industrial coating plant in the Detroit suburbs on Oct. 9, he declared: “This is a company that’s actually benefiting from reshoring to bring products back to the United States.” ![A large clamp squeezes a headless businessman above an arched bridge spanning a river, with factories on one bank and a red maple leaf on the other.](https://rews.cc/img/b4daa90d5a948378c2fe252208f7a6db9cce8bbb.webp) Then came the polls — two of them, each showing more than 60 percent of Michigan voters opposed to the Canada tariffs. On Oct. 7, the day before his first televised debate with El-Sayed, Rogers released an ad and reversed his position. “Here in Michigan we know that Canada is not our enemy,” he declared. “We need to end this tariff war, now,” promising to “bring both parties together to lower your prices.” The ad did not mention Trump. El-Sayed, who holds a consistent if narrow lead — 2.7 percentage points in an average of recent surveys — offered his own account of the conversion. “The reason he’s flip-flopping has nothing to do with policy,” he told reporters in Grand Rapids the morning the ad appeared. “It has nothing to do with your costs. \[It\] has everything to do with his sagging poll numbers.” Fred Upton, the former Republican congressman from Michigan, rendered the same verdict from within the party: the ad is good, he told the Globe, “but it’s a little late to say the least. The tariffs are crippling for Michigan.” Crippling, because Michigan is not so much a neighbour of Canada as a Siamese twin. Four bridges carry more than 40 percent of all truck traffic between the two countries. Detroit’s auto industry is intricately tied to manufacturers in Windsor, just across the river. For decades, Michiganders crossed the international border with no more thought than a state line — many preferring Canada to archrival Ohio to the south. “You want to have a tariff war with Ohio, I’m not going to fight you over it,” El-Sayed said in Grand Rapids on Oct. 8. “But Canada? They’re like the nicest people in the world.” ![Two cream gears on a blue background contain a tire and a red Canadian maple leaf, with a striped barrier arm between them.](https://rews.cc/img/081e41e6969c3b8749e173bdf1b1d058a4a48499.webp) El-Sayed has made Trump’s “insane” tariffs and the cost of living the centerpiece of his progressive campaign, and Democrats have branded his rival “Price Hike Mike.” Both camps cite an analysis from the nonpartisan National Taxpayers Union Foundation finding that Michigan bore the highest average hit per household of any state from Trump’s second-term tariffs: $5,619 in additional costs from January 2025 through this past June 30. Jason Miller, a supply chain management professor at Michigan State University, cautions that exact tariff effects are hard to pinpoint — but there is no doubt, he says, that Michigan is among the states most affected by the Canada measures, the impact spreading from Detroit’s factories to the farms that occupy about a quarter of the state’s acreage. On those farms the war is measured in fertilizer. “Ninety percent of our potash comes from Canada,” said Paul Gross, 71, a small farmer from Mount Pleasant. Trump has so far exempted Canadian potash from the higher tariffs, but Ontario Premier Doug Ford has suggested Canada could withhold it as leverage. “I think people are just really frustrated in the ag community,” said Gross, an independent on the board of the Michigan Farmers Union — which endorsed El-Sayed at an Oct. 9 soybean farm event in Ithaca. Julie Alexander, a 62-year-old farmer who chairs the Rogers campaign’s farmers coalition, dismissed the endorsement — the Farm Bureau’s AgriPac backs Rogers — and hedged when asked about the tariffs themselves: “It’s painful right now, but we need to look at the bigger picture and long-term outcomes when we look at tariffs.” She was waiting, at the time, for a “barn party” headlined by Rogers in Highland Township. ![A cream watering can bearing a red maple leaf drips onto three wilted seedlings in dark soil against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/5e174fbb5e4cae5a4fe164fd5aff28b226af0c9e.webp) Rogers leans on that bigger picture. “What we’ve said is, listen, if it’s good for Michigan, I’ll be fighting for it,” he told reporters before the barn party, arguing that some tariffs have benefited cherry farmers and the auto industry. “If it’s bad for Michigan, I’ll be working with the president and my friends in the Senate to say we’ve got to change whatever that might be.” It is a harder sell along the river. “The \[expletive\] that Trump is starting with the Canadians, it’s going to hurt all of us states that are borders with Canada,” said Rob Nicholas, 65, a retired printer from Lexington, half an hour north of Port Huron. “It’s treating your neighbors poorly. They’re our neighbors,” added his wife Cheri, 62, a middle school special education teacher; their two daughters in their 20s are struggling because “everything is so much more expensive.” The couple voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and were among roughly 1,200 people packed into a Port Huron auditorium for El-Sayed’s Oct. 6 town hall. “I know we got our neighbors in Canada, and it’s been a little bit of a rough go of it,” he told the crowd. “And as much as Donald Trump wants to ruin things for them, I think we got an opportunity to remind them what we’re about.” Afterwards, measuring how heavy a liability the tariffs have become for his opponent, El-Sayed issued a dare for the weeks remaining before the Nov. 3 election. “He wants everybody to know that he’s on the ballot. I want everybody to know that he’s on the ballot, too,” he said as the cameras rolled. “So Donald, if you’re watching, don’t wuss out, man. ... You should tell everybody why you’re on the ballot, your tariffs are on the ballot, and your war is on the ballot.” The president has not yet taken up the invitation. The river, meanwhile, keeps flowing past Port Huron, and the storefront window still frames a town full of brothers who no longer come.