On April 29, 2025 — three weeks after Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs — Erin Houchin published an op-ed with a headline that left no wiggle room:

"President Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing."

In it, she wrote that the tariffs were doing exactly what they were designed to do, that "now we're seeing the results, not just in statistics or economic reports, but in real communities," and that "this is just the beginning."

She closed: "President Trump's America First agenda is not a slogan—it's a governing philosophy. ... And it's working."

Fifteen months later, the statistics and economic reports she waved off have arrived.

What actually happened to Indiana

On July 22, 2026, the nonpartisan Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois published Tariffs and the Midwest: Impacts on Households, Manufacturing, and Economies in Six States.

For Indiana, as Indiana Legislative Insight summarized the findings:

Across the six Midwest states studied, tariffs cost almost 42,000 manufacturing jobs and more than $18 billion in GDP. Only Michigan took a bigger hit than Indiana.

There's a reason for that, and Houchin knows it better than most members of Congress: Indiana is the most manufacturing-dependent state in the country. Manufacturing is 24.2% of its GDP — the next closest Midwest state is Iowa at 16.7% — and 16% of its workforce, double the national share. When you tax the imported steel, aluminum and components that factories buy, Indiana is the state that pays first.

The report's own framing is that Midwest states are "manufacturing-intensive and have large agricultural sectors, making them vulnerable to tariffs and retaliatory actions by other countries."

The researchers also worked out the marginal cost, which is the number to remember every time the rate goes up: each additional one-percentage-point increase in tariffs costs the average Hoosier family $364, kills 1,288 Indiana factory jobs, and knocks 0.07% off state GDP.

Last week, the administration announced a new round of tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on goods from more than 80 countries.

Her evidence was one bicycle company

Houchin's op-ed made its case with a single example: Guardian Bikes, which was putting $19 million into a factory in Seymour, Indiana, to build bicycles domestically. She toured the plant, quoted CEO Brian Riley saying tariffs drove the decision, and called it proof.

Guardian is a real company doing real work — it makes thousands of bikes a day in Seymour and pays starting wages around $22 an hour. Nobody should want that factory to fail.

But one plant is not a state economy. Guardian's expansion and Indiana's 9,148 lost manufacturing jobs happened in the same year, in the same state. Houchin's column was about the first number.

There's a further wrinkle. Guardian has since asked the federal government to add a 50% tariff on the aluminum, steel, frames and parts in imported bicycles — a push the Indianapolis Business Journal reported puts the company at odds with much of the bicycle industry. That is what tariff policy usually looks like up close: a concentrated winner who wants more, and a diffuse set of losers who each pay a little.

Houchin's op-ed only described the winner.

The honest caveats, and why they don't rescue the column

Two things cut in her favor and are worth saying plainly.

Indiana's economy did not collapse. The state's forecasting consultant, S&P Global Market Intelligence, warned in April 2025 that tariff uncertainty would drag growth down to 1.3%, and by December was telling lawmakers that tariff impacts had been "generally less than feared in spring 2025." Real gross state product grew about four percent last year.

But "less bad than the worst case" is not "reviving American manufacturing." The study measures what the tariffs themselves did — $2.65 billion in output that didn't happen, 9,148 factory jobs that don't exist, $2,600 out of the average Hoosier household's pocket. A growing economy that would have grown more is still a household paying more at the register.

And the household number is the one voters feel. $2,600 a year is a car payment. It is the deductible. It is a big share of the grocery budget for the 21,534 households in her district that use SNAP to buy food.

She's not the only Hoosier who wrote this check

Indiana's other Republicans have been running the same play. Fellow Indiana congressman Marlin Stutzman kept defending the tariffs while Indiana farmers ate a $607 million hit — the agricultural half of the same story the University of Illinois team documented.

Houchin has been in Congress since 2023. She sits on Energy and Commerce, Rules, and Budget. She wrote that "if we stay the course on tariffs ... we can see a manufacturing resurgence like this across every state in the country."

Indiana stayed the course. It lost 9,148 manufacturing jobs, and every household in the state paid for the privilege.

Source

Tallying tariffs' Indiana impact — Indiana Legislative Insight, August 5, 2026, reporting on the MEPI/PMCR study. Houchin's op-ed was published by WBIW on April 29, 2025, and is linked above.