Only once, it seems, did Trump discuss dairy farming. In March 2016, while on his way to Janesville, Wis., Trump was asked about how his firm stance against immigrants in the country illegally might negatively affect the state he was visiting.

“We have a huge dairy farming industry. That industry relies on immigrant labor to be successful,” Trump was asked during a news conference on his plane. “They’re telling me, if you round up all of the immigrants and deport them, the agricultural economy in this state is going to go bust.” A report from 2015 put a number on that impact: 1 in 6 dairy farms could close and the price of milk might double without immigrant labor.

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“When you need help,” Trump replied, “the people are going to be able to come in” — apparently referring to the visa process that his companies use regularly. From there, he riffed on his concerns about immigration broadly.

That was the extent of his discussion of the subject on the campaign trail, according to the catalogue of Trump comments at Factbase — despite the fact that the dairy industry employs far more people than the relatively small coal industry.

After the election, though — and this week in particular — Trump put a newfound emphasis on dairy employment in the United States. Thanks to a shift in Canada that will undercut prices on milk products manufactured in the United States, the dairy industry here and in Wisconsin in particular finds itself in dire straits.

As the Globe and Mail explains, technological advances improving the filtering of milk allowed American dairy producers to send ultrafiltered milk products to Canada. Canadian dairy farmers began selling those products more cheaply, taking advantage of a price-protection system in that country, resulting in Canadian companies turning away from using American milk products. The National Milk Producers Federation estimates that the net effect could be a decrease in hundreds of millions of dollars of sales. A group of legislators from Wisconsin sent a letter to Trump drawing his attention to the issue two weeks ago; this week, Trump made it clear that he’d take up the fight with the Canadians.

The “border states” to which Trump refers here are ones such as Wisconsin, Michigan and New York, each of which has a fairly substantial dairy industry.

In fact, that’s one of the major reasons that this fight makes perfect sense for Trump. If you consider the number of dairy operations in each state and compare it with how that state leaned during the election that brought Trump to the White House, there’s a clear pattern: Several of the states that have the most dairy operations (using 2012 data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service) are also ones that Trump narrowly won on his path to an electoral-college victory.

In four of the six states with the most dairy operations in 2012, the combined margin of victory was about 122,000 votes. (The other two are Ohio and New York, which weren’t close.) Trump won three of them — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — by about 78,000, breaking Democratic dominance in the upper Midwest. In other words, the net effect would be huge in places that Trump won (and lost) only narrowly. (California, which has a number of large dairies and a lot of processing capacity, doesn’t register very high on the graph. But Trump’s not winning that state, either.)

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Coming to the rescue of the American dairy farmer serves the same end as his efforts to champion coal miners during the campaign, with the happy side effect of addressing the needs of a bigger industry. What’s more, the line here from one of his pet issues — trade, much less trade with NAFTA partner Canada — to his desired outcome is clear.

Trump’s a bit late to the fight. But it’s a fight that’s just about tailor-made for him.