[CTC] Democrats Could Become a Free-Trade Counterweight to Trump

[Arthur Stamoulis]

Nope


https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-could-become-a-free-trade-counterweight-to-trump-1531911601?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1 <https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-could-become-a-free-trade-counterweight-to-trump-1531911601?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1>

Democrats Could Become a Free-Trade Counterweight to Trump
 
By Greg Ip  
July 18, 2018

In Tennessee’s critical Senate race, it’s the Democrat running as a free trader. Phil Bredesen, a former governor, poses in a whiskey distillery in a recent ad and slams President Donald Trump’s tariffs: “They hurt our auto industry, our farmers, and Tennessee exports like Jack Daniel’s.”

Since the 1940s, the Republicans have been the party of free trade, Democrats the party of protection. Those labels need updating. Mr. Trump’s imposition of tariffs on allies and adversaries alike is accelerating a migration of Democratic voters toward free trade and Republicans away from it. Among elected legislators, the median Republican is still pro-free trade and the median Democrat a skeptic, but those lines, too, are shifting.

That has potentially significant consequences if Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections. They could become a counterweight to Mr. Trump’s protectionist agenda.

The shift was on display last week, when the Senate voted on a proposal by Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker to require Mr. Trump to consult Congress when invoking national security to impose tariffs, as he did with steel and aluminum. All Democrats voted in favor; only 78% of Republicans did.

In an interview, Mr. Corker said Republicans who voted no were worried about contradicting the president; theirs, he said, is still the party of free trade. But, he added, a lot of Republicans noticed that Mr. Bredesen, who is campaigning to replace the retiring Mr. Corker, is so forcefully backing trade. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, this fellow is a pretty smart, he’s supporting free trade, he must know something politically.’ This is an issue that cuts across political factions.”

Democrats historically opposed free trade because they relied heavily on union votes and power. But in the 2000s blue-collar industrial-region workers began shifting to the Republican party while college-educated urban and suburban voters increasingly voted Democratic. Today, 67% of voters who identify as Democrats or lean Democratic consider free trade a good thing, according to the Pew Research Center; just 43% of Republicans do.

Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution has found that coastal urban centers that provide the bulk of Democratic votes have benefited most from globalization, whether free trade, foreign investment, or immigration.

The divide is also cultural: Democrats increasingly identify with cosmopolitan values like openness to trade, immigration and culture. For some, Mr. Trump’s dislike of free trade only makes it more appealing.

Free trade has yet to convert the bulk of elected Democrats, especially those in traditional rust-belt regions. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio), a longtime skeptic of free trade, has allied himself with Mr. Trump on tariffs and stopped a tougher version of Mr. Corker’s proposal from getting a vote. Conor Lamb wrested a Pittsburgh-area district away from Republicans in a special election in part by endorsing Mr. Trump’s steel tariffs.

And the party’s rising progressive left instinctively equates trade deals with giveaways to corporations and the rich. In 2016 Hillary Clinton recanted her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious 12-nation trade pact, under pressure from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), a self-described democratic socialist.

So Democrats aren’t going to make trade the centerpiece of their efforts to retake the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate this fall. Global trade ranks last among voters’ priorities.

But Ed Gerwin, a trade expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist think tank aligned with Democrats, says trade is local and the fallout from Mr. Trump’s tariffs has given Democrats opportunities they didn’t have five years ago: “If you are running in a farm district in California’s central valley, Kansas or Nebraska or a suburban district like Houston or Dallas, this is a message that really resonates.”

The president’s disdain for longstanding trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization and his willingness to treat adversaries like China and allies like Canada alike has alarmed even protectionist members of the Democratic caucus, like Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett. “Terminating or repealing [Nafta] will have far-reaching consequences in Texas,” he warned last fall.

All this means that a Democratic-controlled Congress, traditionally hostile territory for free-trade legislation, may be friendlier now. Democrats may see countering tariffs and protecting trade pacts as politically useful not for its own sake but as a way of constraining Mr. Trump.
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