Who Favors
Free Trade Agreements?
Jackie Calmes
New York Times; September 22, 2016
WASHINGTON — Few issues in this campaign cycle seem as toxic as trade: Both
major-party presidential candidates oppose President Obama’s 12-nation
Trans-Pacific Partnership, and congressional leaders, having refused all year to
vote on the trade accord until after the election, say they will not do so even
then — potentially killing the largest regional trade pact in history.
So that must mean voters are overwhelmingly opposed, right? Wrong.
National polls continue to show that Americans either narrowly favor
international trade generally, and the so-called T.P.P. specifically, or are
split. Younger voters are especially favorable. But Republicans are not,
reflecting the influence of the anti-trade nominee
Donald J. Trump
on his traditionally pro-trade party. And certainly trade remains more unpopular
in battleground states like Ohio, where it is blamed for years of manufacturing
job losses.
Yet the level of support for trade agreements in general, and the pending
Pacific pact in particular, stands in notable contrast to the toxicity of trade
in an election season largely defined by anger among working-class voters. What
matters to many politicians, however, is the fact that the opponents are the
ones most motivated to vote based on the issue — just as they are on issues like
immigration and gun restrictions that also have more support than divisive
debates suggest.
“There really is a lot of ambivalence on the part of the public” toward expanded
foreign trade, said Jay Campbell, a senior vice president with the polling firm
Hart Research,
who is not working for a presidential campaign.
“At a very basic level they know it’s a
necessary thing for the United States to trade with other countries — that is
clear as a bell throughout all the polling,” Mr. Campbell said. But when asked
about trade’s impact on jobs, “people are more inclined to think it’s more of a
negative than a positive.”
A
survey last month
by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that Americans by 50 to 42 percent
said trade agreements had been “a good thing” for the United States. By a
narrower 40 to 35 percent, they said the same of the Pacific pact, which would
phase out tariffs and set commercial rules between the United States and nations
from Canada and Japan to Australia, Vietnam and Chile.
Mr. Trump has had a measurable negative impact, the research center said. In a
Pew poll a month before Mr. Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015,
Republicans, by 51 to 39 percent, said trade accords had been good for the
nation. By last month, after Mr. Trump was nominated, Republicans, by 61 to 32
percent, called past agreements a bad thing, a flip that has not been lost on
Congress’s Republican leaders.
Democrats’ views are little changed. Among registered voters surveyed by Pew, 55
percent of supporters of
Hillary Clinton,
the Democratic nominee, said the Pacific pact would be a good thing (58 percent
of Trump supporters said the opposite). And while Mrs. Clinton, under pressure
from her anti-trade pact Democratic primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of
Vermont, came out in opposition to the T.P.P. in October, a Pew survey in March
found that even 55 percent of Sanders supporters said trade agreements had been
good for the country.
The pollster for the liberal group Public Citizen, which is among the most
active opponents of trade agreements,
recently found
that the public comes to the debate over T.P.P. from a position “bordering on
neutrality,” with Republicans very negative and Democrats more positive. A
plurality of all Americans favored past agreements, it said.
“The public rates past trade agreements more positively than not, though many
are unsure and few hold strong opinions,” said a memo on the poll by Democracy
Corps, a liberal nonprofit founded by the Democratic strategists Stanley
Greenberg and James Carville.
As for the T.P.P. specifically, 56 percent of voters were either unfamiliar with
it or neutral, the group said. To build opposition, Democracy Corps recommended
that opponents link the agreement to the influence over government by
corporations and “big money.”
Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding, given that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr.
Trump oppose the T.P.P., was in a July
Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Asked if they wanted the next president to be someone who supports trade
agreements or opposes them, 75 percent of respondents said they wanted a
supporter and 17 percent favored an opponent.
A
Gallup poll
early this year found that 58 percent of Americans viewed trade as an economic
opportunity, 34 percent as a threat. Similarly, in
a July poll for NBC News,
55 percent of registered voters agreed with a statement that trade was good
“because it opens up new markets and we cannot avoid the fact that it is a
global economy,” while 38 percent agreed that trade was bad “because it has hurt
manufacturing and other key industries.”
Among the groups most supportive of trade are younger and highly educated
voters.
The Pew survey, for example, found that people with a high school education or
less said that trade agreements had hurt their family’s finances — by a ratio of
nearly two to one. That survey and
a poll in June
by the Associated Press-NORC Center and Black Youth Project found that about
two-thirds of voters under 30 said that trade agreements had helped them and
their families.
But strategists in both parties say those who are more supportive of trade are
less likely to vote on that issue than are the opponents.
“I can guarantee you that the intensity and energy on the issue is all on the
anti-trade side,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster and founding partner
of the firm
Public Opinion Strategies.
“It’s a motivating issue, and one that hits home to Americans who are still
struggling to make it back from the recession.”
He added: “Those who support free trade are more ‘lukewarm.’ For them it’s not a
voting issue.”
Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster and strategist for
Priorities USA Action,
a
super PAC
supporting Mrs. Clinton, echoed Mr. Newhouse. “The people who are opposed to
trade agreements feel more passionately about it than the people who are
supportive of them,” he said.
Alluding to Mr. Obama’s arguments that approving the T.P.P. is crucial for American influence in the Asia-Pacific region, Mr. Garin added: “Most people don’t really live in the world of geopolitics, and don’t think very much about China’s influence in the Pacific relative to our influence in the Pacific. But they do think about jobs and wages and whether corporations can be trusted to use these trade agreements for the greater benefit of the American people.”
Presidents do worry about geopolitics, and that alone could keep the Pacific deal alive. On Friday, after Mr. Obama met with business leaders and elected officials to coordinate their uphill campaign for the accord, the mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed, told reporters, “People who run for office often campaign against trade, but people who become president of the United States end up supporting trade.”