Will the Democrats Become the Party of Free Trade?

Another partisan reversal on trade presents itself.

Photo by Erik Odiin on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has made no secret of its distaste for protectionism — and using the guise of national security to promote protectionism. While the current iteration of the Trump administration represents the most incompetent variant of this strategy, the Biden team gave it a run for its money during its four years, Indeed, one could credibly claim that Trump’s rise fueled a steady,. bipartisan elite consensus in favor of significant trade protectionism. While this was economically stupid, following the trade preferences of the swing states median voter did have an ineluctable political logic.

The question is whether Trump has been so ham-handed and quixotic in his trade policy that it incentivizes Democrats to start sounding like free traders again. Politico’s Victoria Guida suggests the answer is yes:

Democrats across the country are going all-in on attacking Trump’s global tariffs as they aim to convince voters that they’re serious about tackling the high cost of living. And they are increasingly making their opposition to this president’s trade policy a central piece of their strategy for the midterm elections.

It’s a pretty remarkable stance for a party that hasn’t always been high on removing barriers to trade, focusing instead on protecting American workers.

It’s not hard to see why they sense an opening: Roughly two-thirds of Americans, who are now much more educated about what tariffs are, don’t like what Trump is doing with them, and affordability has been a potent issue since the inflation spike that peaked in 2022 under President Joe Biden.

But it could also be the early stages of a sea change in how the party approaches trade.

For many years, protectionism was on the rise among Democrats. Under pressure from the left in the 2016 election, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a key architect of Obama’s diplomatic pivot toward Asia, repudiated his plan for a free-trade alliance in the region. When Biden came to office, he and his aides promised not to roll back Trump’s first-term tariffs, but rather to revise and refine them.

Democrats have a simpler message now: Tariffs are making stuff more expensive.

“It’s hurting consumers. It’s hurting small businesses,” Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), who leads campaign efforts for House Democrats, told me.

Democrats are not yet going full throttle on pushing for free trade in the way Polis might like. But they’ve grown pretty unequivocal about the ills of Trump’s world trade war. After all, it’s a relatively straightforward policy to propose a rollback of the tariffs, as well as easy shorthand for saying the party is focused on affordability.

And there are signs this messaging will linger even after the 2026 midterms….

Globalization as a bogeyman has lost some of its political allure. It’s been replaced with an emphasis on the cost of living.

The question is whether it will linger long enough for a Democrat to be elected president with a free-trade platform.

There are some reasons to doubt this. For one thing, the pro-economic security folks at the Hewlett Foundation and the Roosevelt Institute ain’t gonna go down without a fight — although their close association with Biden might hurt their standing within the party.

For another, unions remain an important component of the Democratic coalition, and they are still likely to be leery of any significant trade liberalization. Though as Guida notes, “Even the AFL-CIO, the largest labor organization in the U.S., which maintains its support for import taxes as a tool, has criticized ‘tariffs for the sake of tariffs.’”

Finally, negative partisanship is a hell of a drug. Support for freer trade skyrocketed during Trump’s first term but subsided while Biden was president. The next Democrat will be keenly aware of that trend once they come into office.

There are also some reasons to wonder if this time might be different, however. First, there have been periods in U.S. history when Democrats were the party of free trade. Between the Civil War and the Second World War the Democrats were the less protectionist party, for example. A return to that equilibrium is not impossible.

Second, Trump’s tariffs have been so egregious that they create space for Democrats to be freer traders without being free traders. As concerns about the cost of living have risen, cutting tariffs can become a significant boost of purchasing power to lower and middle-class Americans.

In an odd way, the worse Trump’s policies are, the more likely the Democrats embrace freer trade. The economy needs to perform in a manner such that the opposition party can point to Trump’s tariffs as the proximate cause.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World wants to be optimistic about the Democrats embracing freer trade. The problem is for that to happen the staff needs to hope the U.S. economy suffers from Trump’s dumbass tariffs. To put it mildly, that is a policy conundrum.

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