Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast. My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the

spectator and the editor of its U.S. edition. We thought that 2020 was going to be all about the

presidential election, but now it will forever be the year of the pandemic.

So instead, Americano is going to look at how COVID-19 is transforming the United States and its politics.

There's a lot to talk about, perhaps even more so than before. So please keep tuning in.

I'm joined today by Matt Mayer, who is president of Opportunity Ohio, and we're going to be asking if the 2020 election will end up being all about China.

Matt, you wrote a fascinating piece for us about the triple hit that China has inflicted on the American Midwest and how this could become a crucial factor in the election.

Could you take us through what the triple hit is and why it will be so important in 2020?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, essentially what you have to do is step back a bit in open up your

aperture and realize that places like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, those are the really critical states

for Donald Trump's election in 2016 and will be the critical states in 2020. Those states were

greatly impacted by NAFTA and the movement and globalization in terms of pushing things to China,

literally where there were factories in Ohio that were taken apart and shipped over to China

and rebuilt where the job losses were happening in the 1990s and the early 2000s. So that was the

first hit that really started decimating Main Street America in those key battleground

Midwestern states. As you saw then those folks who lost their jobs, you know, lost opportunity, main streets

were closing down. That's when you saw the rise of the use of opioids to treat that kind

of psychological and physical pain that these minimum had gone through. And then when China

started flooding the U.S. market with fentanyl that was coming out of Wuhan, ironically, right,

you started seeing these massive spike and overdose

deaths all across America. You know, we've had more than 20,000 in Ohio. They estimate we're going to

have 50,000 per year over the next decade, which is, you know, half a million Americans, which far exceeds

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