The Free Trade Flippity Flop? Are Republicans Really Protectionists?
Lately, Democrats and Republicans seem to be switching positions on the issues at a head-spinning rate. Is free trade one such partisan flip-flop?
The story of what I call the “free trade flip” goes something like this. For decades, Republicans were the party of free trade, Democrats were the party of protectionism, and everything made sense. Republicans tended to be wealthy people who benefited from globalization and believed free markets offered the rising tide that floated everyone’s boat. By contrast, Democrats tended to be working-class folks who saw the market’s invisible hand giving them the finger as their jobs were outsourced to Mexico or China. Then along came Trump, who turned Republicans into a bunch of “America First” protectionists.
I was one of those who bought into the “free trade flip” story. Now I’m not so sure. Although the story has kernels of truth, some of it is misleading or downright wrong. For instance, Republican voters—and I’m only looking at voters, not politicians—have changed their minds about free trade over the years. However, how much they’ve changed and why they’ve done so are open questions.
Evidence for “The Free Trade Flip.” Republican voters have soured on free trade over the years, at least until 2016. According to the Pew Center, Republican support for free trade declined by 35% from 2009 to 2016. Paradoxically, most Democrats (58%) now think free trade is a good idea.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/08/18/5-issues-and-the-2016-campaign/
What Isn’t True in the “Free Trade Flip” Story. Many people blame Trump for the protectionist turn in American foreign policy. However, the trend predated Trump. Political Scientist Diana Mutz shows that Republicans’ support for free trade plummeted between 2006 and 2010, well before Trump began yelling about NAFTA and China (or before anyone started to listen to him).
https://global.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/go-changing-party-mutz.original.pdf
Moreover, the idea that Republicans are now a bunch of beggar-thy-neighbor protectionists is (was?) wrong. The 2000 American National Election Study showed that only about 9 percent of Republicans opposed free trade. Of course, a lot has happened in 25 years.
Interestingly, political scientist John Mueller showed that both parties’ support for free trade actually increased after Trump’s election.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/trumps-attacks-free-trade-have-actually-made-it-more-popular-voters
So, the “free trade flip” story is wrong about Trump killing off GOP free traders. And while a protectionist sentiment might be growing in the GOP, it is still the minority opinion.
What We Don’t Know About The Story.
There is a lot we don’t know. First, I’m unsure how much of the “free trade flip” story to believe. I haven’t conducted a thorough meta-analysis of public opinion on trade, but I’ve looked at enough surveys to know the picture is muddled. The Pew and Mutz studies cited above show Democrats favor free trade more than Republicans. However, the ANES and Chicago Council surveys—along with a Monmouth University poll I’ll discuss below—show either that Republicans are more likely to support free trade than Democrats or that there is no real difference between the parties.
But even if parties have flopped on free trade, there is considerable debate as to why. Here are the three possibilities.
Bottom-up: Changes in Party Composition. It used to be that White, working-class people were Democrats. Now, they are Republicans. In “How the GOP Became the Party of the Left Behind,” Eduardo Porter shows the dramatic change in the socioeconomic composition of the Republican Party.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/27/business/economy/republican-party-voters-income.html
Working-class voters, especially in the Rust Belt and throughout rural America, arguably suffer the most from free trade and globalization. As a result, Republican politicians now represent more constituents who need protection from the forces of globalization and the vagaries of the free market. Therefore, it is no surprise that the GOP is backing away from its laissez-faire economic roots (see Thomas Edsall’s “The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming from the Suburbs,” and Gerald Seib’s “Can the GOP Become a Real Working-Class Party?”
2. Top-Down: Change in GOP Ideology. Diana Mutz disagrees with the bottom-up argument. Instead, she argues Republican politicians have changed how voters see free trade. Mutz writes:
“By using people’s initial partisan and ideological self-identifications from the beginning of the ISCAP panel study, it becomes clear that this change in party alignment is not a change in who counts themselves as Republican. In other words, it is not that people who were anti-trade came to support the Republican party, or came to identify more conservatively than before. Instead, those who already identified as Republican and/ or conservative changed their minds about globalization. Given the long and well-documented history of elite-driven, top-down opinion change among the American public, particularly when it comes to highly complex issues, this is an unusual occurrence.” -- Diana Muz “Changing Party Alignments in American Attitudes Toward Trade.”
Mutz cites several reasons why Republicans might be skeptical of free trade, including the well-established finding that economic protectionism is the natural outgrowth of nationalism. In short, the top-down view says that the more Republican politicians criticize free trade, the more Republican voters will come to believe them.
3. Source Cues: The Trump Effect. While I think there is some truth to both the bottom-up and top-down views, they both miss the outsized influence that Donald Trump has on voters. Consider the following survey from Monmouth University:
The survey shows that Republicans are more supportive of free trade in the abstract than Democrats, which works against the “free trade flip” thesis. But I think the more important finding is that partisans use source cues to answer questions about free trade.
A little background. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994, provided a free trade zone between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. NAFTA was one of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags; he repeatedly called it the “worst trade deal ever made.” The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)—the Trump administration’s renegotiation of NAFTA—went into effect in 2020.
Now, back to the survey. Republicans hate NAFTA (14% approval) but love the USMCA (65%). Democrats, by contrast, preferred NAFTA to the USMCA by almost 37%. Independents gave both agreements similar lukewarm ratings (37.8% for NAFTA; 34.6% for the USMCA).
So, what gives? I’m willing to bet a lot of money that the average voter doesn’t know the difference between NAFTA and the USMCA. I would also bet that most voters know that Trump hated NAFTA, and, in the end, that’s all that matters. Trump provided a “source cue” that took a complicated question on trade agreements and made it easy for partisans to answer. In short, I think Republican voters are not so much anti-trade as they are pro-Trump.
Conclusion. We probably won’t know for a couple of years whether Republicans are really anti-trade or just pro-Trump. But while there has always been tension between free-market conservatives and social conservatives in the GOP, things feel different today. Social conservatives seem to be ascendant, with economic conservatives in retreat. We see evidence of this in Republicans running away from entitlement reforms, a significant departure from conservative orthodoxy. Free traders might not find much of a home in the Democratic Party, either. After all, Joe Biden is a union guy who has kept most of the Trump-era tariffs on China. As Raymond Niles writes, “hostility to free trade is now officially bipartisan.”
