“There’s frustration in the public right now where wealth is being concentrated, the opportunities for economic mobility are lower, and they see the people who receive these deals seemingly unconcerned with their reality,” he added.
Wisconsin, a battleground state that Mr. Trump narrowly won in 2016 as part of his appeal to white blue-collar voters, is certain to be a crossroads of national Democratic contenders ahead of 2020, as they try to win back some of those voters and excite others who stayed home. That Mr. Trump played a role in the Foxconn deal — and jumped in again recently when the Taiwan-based company wavered — is a ready-made target for Democrats inclined to criticize corporate giveaways.
Mr. Hintz said the issue played a role in the re-election loss last year of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican.
Even as New York sent Amazon packing, other cities and regions renewed their courtship of the company. On Thursday, Newark officials sent a courier in red to deliver a giant heart-shaped card to the company bearing the Valentine’s Day message that the city and New Jersey “still love u, Amazon!”
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Mr. Booker, who is seeking the Democratic nomination, has made no comment on the deal. A Democratic county chairman in Iowa, Kurt Meyer, who put Mr. Booker up overnight on a recent swing through the state, predicted that criticisms of large corporations would feature in appeals to the party base there, which is more progressive than in many states. Iowa’s $208 million in incentives for an Apple data center near Des Moines with just 50 jobs was debated in last year’s midterm elections.
“I suspect the issue will be exploited extensively in Iowa, due in part to our vague but distinct sense of economic insecurity, which, while unrelated to Amazon and Apple, is pretty dry tinder,” Mr. Meyer said.
At a CNN town hall in Iowa last month, Ms. Harris was asked if the existence of multibillionaires was “morally defensible.” She replied that the 2017 Republican tax cut bill was “unconscionable” for giving breaks to corporations and those in the top 1 percent but excluding working families.
