Volume 17, Issue 4

The Trump administration has reversed a 70-year consensus and transformed both the substance of trade policy and the postwar role the US has played in its global management. It has also reconfigured the role of the president in the domestic trade policy process. Armed with the power and influence the US amassed during its long run as leader of the post-war liberal world economy, the Trump administration has used trade as its principle coercive weapon in foreign policy. It has achieved some success, albeit at high diplomatic cost and by putting at risk America’s long-standing structural advantages in the world economy. Given that domestic discontent with the liberal world economy has increased significantly, it is likely that the core aspects of Trump’s trade revolution will endure, even if subsequent administrations soften Trump’s provocative execution of it.

Who supports trade in the US Congress? We uncover the ideological space of trade voting, focusing on trade agreements and development policy as two fundamental cleavages around globalization. We then cluster members of Congress into coherent voting blocs, and identify the most pro-trade voting blocs in each Chamber. We find that these blocs: cross party lines; are ideologically heterogeneous; and are over-represented on the committees with jurisdiction over trade. We then examine two leading theories of Congressional voting – on constituency characteristics and campaign contributions – and find support for each using our learned voting blocs. Members of pro-trade blocs have defended their constituents’ and contributors’ interests by speaking out to confront the Trump administration’s protectionism. We conclude that unsupervised learning methods provide a valuable tool for exploring the multifaceted and dynamic divisions which characterize current debates over global economic integration.

President Trump campaigned on “making America great again” through trade and immigration restrictions. I argue that it is difficult for policymakers to restrict both trade and immigration because of trade’s effects on business support for immigration. When trade is restricted, more low-skill intensive goods are made in the US, leading to more demand for low-skill immigration from businesses. As businesses are relatively powerful, we should expect immigration to open. Conversely, when trade opens, fewer low-skill intensive goods are made in the US, leading to the closure of the firms that produce these goods. This reduces demand for low-skill labor and, with it, the demand for low-skill immigration. As business demand for immigration recedes, policymakers restrict immigration to appease anti-immigrant groups. Using data on immigration and trade in the US, I show that this relationship has held over US history. At the end of the article I hypothesize several reasons why Trump’s tariffs are not leading to more demand for immigration due to their limited effects on trade and the job market.

This essay reviews US trade flows and trade policy from the perspective of consumers. Trade policy shapes the prices and the availability of products sold in the US to, ultimately, voters. Understanding the role of consumers in explaining US trade policy may therefore offer lessons for our understanding of politics beyond trade. International trade has created substantial gains for consumers, both by lowering domestic prices and by increasing access to a wider variety of products. Yet, US trade policy does not appear to reflect consumer interests: tariffs are higher for products with higher consumption shares. This finding is inconsistent with the narrative that open trade is a response to consumer interests, and it is not explained by standard collective action arguments either. Instead, the political influence of pro-trade firms emerges as a driving force of US trade openness. The essay discusses the implications for our understanding of the political and institutional sources of trade openness. If special interest politics explains the opening of trade, it reverses the traditional interpretation of trade openness as an indication of the absence of special interest politics.

While a number of studies in recent years explore the particularistic tendencies of presidents – targeting various benefits to districts and states that will help their and their party’s electoral prospects – little work has explored how members of Congress react to such behavior. We take some initial steps in this regard by examining how members have responded to President Donald Trump’s trade initiatives. We analyze congressional newsletter mentions of tariffs or trade as a means of exploring congressional reaction. We find a positive relationship between tariff/trade mentions and partisanship, as Republican members and members from states that Trump won in 2016 are more likely to refer to tariffs/trade in their newsletters. This represents, we argue, a different kind of credit claiming. These basic empirical patterns set the stage for more systematic analysis in the future.

During the 2016 election cycle, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders received roars of approval from supporters when discussing plans to roll back decades of trade liberalization and more specifically North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the past, protectionist politicians who failed to follow through on promises paid little electoral cost, arguably because NAFTA received relatively little media or political attention after it was passed. Now in the spotlight, could trade policies cost President Trump voters in 2020? I argue that the highly partisan nature of today’s trade discourse – a new dimension for trade opinion – creates obstacles for electoral accountability because preferences follow rather than drive partisanship. Drawing on previous research and a 2017 survey experiment fielded before and after Trump’s trip to China, I show that the ability of trade messaging to cross party lines has weakened and that Trump’s followers strongly react to information cues from Trump but fail to react to information based accusations of flip flopping on his most prominent trade related promise: increased protection against China. The ability of politicians to shape preferences rather than respond to the will of constituents calls into question the electoral connection on critical government policies even when they become salient.

We briefly trace the claim that a set of counties across the three states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in large part determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Rather than the demographic characteristics of the Census as such it is the meaning that these categories (young/old, Black/White, male/female, and so on) take on in particular places in which people’s lives are grounded that drives electoral outcomes. Given that the counties in question were ones in which Obama had performed well but which Trump won in 2016 and this shift was put down to his appeal to those “left behind” in the post-2008 economy, we focus on whether or not this localized appeal can be expected to continue in 2020.

Based on analysis of a multi-wave national sample panel of Republican identifiers, we show the increasing coherence among rank and file Republicans around evaluations of Donald Trump. Differences between Republicans who preferred Trump for the GOP nomination and those who preferred another candidate (but, unlike the Never Trump group who said they could not support him in the general election if he won the nomination) are muted by the general election and 2018 waves. While “Never-Trumpers” in the nomination wave maintain their affective distance from Trump in the general election and 2018 waves, their evaluations become less negative. Our analysis suggests that Republicans’ favorability toward Trump increasingly aligned with their attitudes toward the Republican Party and their support for Trump’s effort to build a southern-border wall.