University of Mary Washington Eagle Scholar Student Research Submissions Spring 5-8-2020 Trump’s 2016 Campaign, the Republican Party, and Trade John Huebler Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.edu/student_research Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Huebler, John, "Trump’s 2016 Campaign, the Republican Party, and Trade" (2020). Student Research Submissions.edu/student_research/323 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by Eagle Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Student Research Submissions by an authorized administrator of Eagle Scholar. For more information, please contact archives@umw.
John Huebler-4-28-20 Trump’s 2016 Campaign, the Republican Party, and Trade I. Introduction The Republican presidential platform on trade traditionally has revolved around open markets and free trade rather than tariffs and protectionism. In 2016, Donald Trump ran a successful campaign with a protectionist platform. Since taking office, Trump has implemented many of the more protectionist policies he campaigned on such as withdrawing from the Trans- Pacific-Partnership, threatening the South Korean Free Trade Agreement, starting a trade war with China, and renegotiating NAFTA.1 The political rise of Trump has brought about a wave of domestic support for protectionism that has flipped Republican public opinion on trade.
According to a compilation of polling data from the Pew Research Center, the effect on Republican voters has been a complete change in policy preference.2 This paper seeks to explore the Trump campaign’s motivation behind changing the Republican presidential platform on trade from free trade to protectionism. It will argue that Trump’s change in precedent can be attributed towards a new campaign strategy on trade focused on using protectionist language to win specific industrial states in the electoral college. This claim will be substantiated by looking at the Trump campaign’s documents, including speeches and press releases, to determine the campaign’s intentions. This analysis reveals that Trump’s criticism of “establishment” 1 Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House, Simon and Schuster, 2018; Simon Lester, Inu Manak, and Kyounghwa Kim, "Trump’s First Trade Deal: The Slightly Revised Korea‑U.
Free Trade Agreement," CATO Institute, June 13, 2019, https://www.org/publications/free-trade-bulletin/trumps-first-trade-deal-slightly- revised-korea-us-free-trade; Doug Stokes, "Trump, American hegemony and the future of the liberal international order," International Affairs 94, no. 2 Pew Research Center, "5. Issues and the 2016 campaign," Pew Research Center, August 18, 2016, www.org/2016/08/18/5-issues-and-the-2016-campaign/; Bradley Jones, "Americans are generally positive about free trade agreements, more critical of tariff increases," Pew Research Center, May 10, 2018, https://www.org/fact-tank/2018/05/10/americans-are-generally-positive-about-free-trade-agreements- more-critical-of-tariff-increases/. candidates’ trade platforms and how he directed his trade platform towards industrial states contributed to his victory through the electoral college in states that were difficult for previous Republican candidates to win, given their free trade position.
It will look at campaign documents to determine Trump’s campaign strategy and how it was able to be so different from previous Republican campaigns. This paper will start with a background on U. trade policy history, focusing on the history of the president becoming the main actor on trade and how that has moved U. trade policy towards free trade.
It will explore the literature on trade decision making, looking at the various factors that contribute to a president’s trade policy, including political, institutional, special interest, and economic pressures. Next, a qualitative study of Trump’s campaign documents related to trade is undertaken, and the findings of the analysis are compared to previous Republican campaigns and platforms. Background In the 1930s, the U. took one of the most drastic trade measures in the country’s history, placing large tariff increases on thousands of items.
In response to the “Smoot-Hawley” legislation, countries around the world raised their tariffs to offset U. In the background, the Great Depression was in full swing and World War II was on the horizon. After considerable economic angst and four years of Smoot-Hawley, the legislature went an opposite direction with the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act (RTAA). This cut most existing tariffs and gave the executive the power to reduce any U.
tariff by 50% without congressional approval while pursuing international agreements with other countries. This shift in decision making was widely agreed upon in the wake of such a large policy blunder. While Smoot-Hawley remained, the president’s ability to bring down tariff rates brought stability. In the postwar period, trade faded as a political issue.
Republicans and Democrats favored it as a mechanism to expand growth and develop alliance networks to combat the spread of Communism and Russia’s sphere of influence.3 Though the economy would falter in the 1970s and 1980s leading Democrats in Congress to campaign on protectionist platforms, the RTAA cemented the president as the principle leader on trade policy in the U. Congress is an inherently protectionist organization. There are strong institutional incentives to promote tariffs in order to directly help economic growth in a constituency and boost electoral chances. Generally, the president does not have such incentives.
Because the constituency becomes the whole country, the president has an incentive to look at trade policy more holistically, trying to benefit the whole country rather than particular sectors or regions. This has typically meant free trade policy rather than protectionist measures to help more narrow industry interests or different regions of the country with strong manufacturing bases. While Congress typically has power over commerce through Article I authority, this power has been ceded to the president through several pieces of legislation such as the RTAA. For these reasons, trade has mainly been conducted by the executive branch.
Literature Review To analyze how the Trump campaign made its decisions on trade policy, it is important to first look at the literature on why politicians make trade decisions. By looking at what factors go into trade decision making, it will help establish a framework for determining what affects Trump’s decision making. Many studies looking at how decisions are made look at Congressional decision making. This is because Congressional votes offer more data points than more limited data on presidential trade decisions.
While this is helpful for assessing how different factors affect decision making for many different actors, the executive, this paper’s 3 Destler, I. American Trade Politics. 4 Timothy Meyer and Ganesh Sitaraman, "Trade and the Separation of Powers," California Law Review 107, no. focus, must worry about the whole country rather than the needs of a particular constituency.
Literature on substantial changes in presidential trade policy is scant because, before the Trump Administration, it was widely assumed that the Executive Branch was structural favorable towards free trade.5 Generally, people point to pressures from political and electoral factors, institutional factors, interest groups, economic indicators, geopolitical competition and alliance networks. Political and Election Factors By “political and election factors,” this paper means ones related to constituent or regional pressures that affect the decisions of Congresspeople, party leaders, or the president based on their chances to maintain popularity or win re-election. Many good examples of this dynamic have been documented. One example was in the post-war period when Democratic President Kennedy implemented tariffs to help the New England textile industry with Republican President Nixon doing the same a few years later.
This can be attributed to political regions in the electoral college shifting with Democrats beginning to win the Northeast and Rust Belt states while losing more in California. The shift reduced Republican reliance on industrial Northeast states that wanted more protectionism. Democrats supported protectionist policies to help the Midwest since the economy was experiencing its worst recession in 40 years which affected the rust belt states. Shortly after this, Walter Mondale, a Minnesota Democrat Senator running for president against Reagan, was the first presidential candidate to make use of these dynamics.
Mondale used trade as a key campaign pillar to distinguish himself from Reagan, blaming his administration for failing to go after unfair practices in international trade that were adversely affecting the economy. In 1982 and 1983 with Mondale’s support, the United Auto Workers 5 Sherman, Richard. "Delegation, ratification, and US trade policy: Why divided government causes lower tariffs." Comparative Political Studies 35, no. introduced a major protectionist bill that would have put duties on Japanese carmakers, pushing them to adopt higher labor standards to equalize competition.
Mondale’s endorsement made the bill a key litmus test for the Democratic party. By forcing a vote, Mondale established trade as a core part of the Democratic platform. While it seemed promising, Mondale’s strategy ended up failing. He was attacked in the media by internationalist Democrats, who were from districts that did not have an interest in protectionism and did not support his trade legislation, fracturing Democratic unity.
Further, his argument for trade as a core election issue was made weak when Reagan began to enact protectionist measures to slightly reduce the trade deficit. While that election was lost, the Democrats used protectionist messaging in 1985 and 1986 to attack “Reaganomics yet had to deal once more with internationalist Democrats as well as competing with protectionist House Republicans.” Yet, this strategy still saw a similar pushback. Internationalist Democrats continued to disagree with protectionist policies, fracturing the party on the issue. Meanwhile, House Republicans were also interested in some form of protectionist policies, trying to separate themselves from Reagan’s policies, which undercut the Democrat’s ability to make trade a partisan issue.6 Looking at some of authors trying to explain such behavior from politicians, Michael Bailey, Judith Goldstein, and Barry R.
Weingast wrote an article attempting to explain how trade decisions are made depending on how politicians perceived economic activity in their districts. At the time, the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act was a political decision by Democrats fearing a future resurgence of Republican representation in Congress. The law made easier for presidents to pursue liberal trade policy without as much constraint since the coalition needed to pass measures through Congress had been lowered. After World War II, presidents had incentive 6 Destler, I.
American Trade Politics. to enact liberal policies since the combined economic harms of Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression made it politically beneficial and because trade with countries that the U. had a trade treaty with expanded rapidly. While recognizing that specific data from each district is hard to obtain, the authors, using district-level industrial data, found that increased exports led to increased Congressional support for free trade.
While the data showed that Congress votes based on constituent interest, these interests changed as American trade policy shifted. Hiscox discredits both accounts assumed by this article, namely, that the RTAA was an act of congressional deference to the executive and that it was a partisan move by the Democrats to enact more favorable free trade policies. Instead of assuming macro-level economic changes, he attributes the change in trade decision making to shifts in the constituencies of both parties. Using a model of economic indicators compared to Congressional voting, Hiscox found that parties have varying coalitions that are split between various regions and industries that had shifted over time.
To adapt to their constituencies for political victories, voting generally shifted to be more in favor of free trade. While Hiscox’s model does account for why liberalization continued, it does not acknowledge the fact that liberal policies were only possible because the RTAA significantly limited Congress’ ability to regulate trade.8 Ronald Rogowski offers a differing opinion on the power of public opinion on trade policy. He starts by explaining Wolfgang Stolper and Paul Samuelson’s 1941 theorem that protectionism benefits those who own factors in which society does not have a lot of resources, as well as those who utilize such small resources. Alternatively, protectionism harms owners of resources that give abundantly relative to the rest of the world.
For instance, one implication was 7 Michael A. Bailey, Judith Goldstein, and Barry R. Weingast, "The institutional roots of American trade policy: Politics, coalitions, and international trade," World Politics 49, no. Hiscox, "The magic bullet? The RTAA, institutional reform, and trade liberalization," International Organization 53, no.
that in a society rich in labor but poor in capital would see protectionism benefiting capital but harming labor.