Mike Rogers called for an end to US tariffs on Canada on October 7. This shift shows a change in American politics regarding trade. Many voters now feel tariffs have a mostly negative effect on the country. As inflation hurts families, politicians are moving away from old anti-globalisation campaign promises.
Karthik Sankaran is a senior research fellow, geoeconomics in the Global South program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
On October 7, Mike Rogers, the GOP candidate in a tight Senate race in Michigan, called for an end to US tariffs on Canada. In doing so, he backtracked on an August 29 statement that declared tariffs to be "necessary, but not a one-size fits all solution."
Rogers' about-face is an illustration of a larger trend in politics in the US and in other parts of the wealthy world -- the erosion of antitrade populism as a viable pathway to power.
Hostility towards global trade has been a seemingly unstoppable trend of the past decade, and a central campaigning message for both left and the right. The trend kicked off when Hillary Clinton chose to repudiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a sop to key portions of the Democratic electorate. This came eleven years to the day ahead of Rogers' own U-turn, and long before the first Republican presidential primary which marked the ascent of Donald Trump.
A shock victory for anti-globalisation sentiment in the Brexit referendum followed in June 2016, with 52 per cent of all voters supporting the UK's withdrawal from the EU. This foreshadowed Trump's victory in the presidential election later that year.
However, after a decade of post-referendum political turmoil that has seen the UK go through seven prime ministers in a little more than 10 years, polls show that a majority support closer relations with the EU and PM Andy Burnham has even raised the prospect of re-entering it.
There are similar signs of second thoughts in US politics too, and not just from Mike Rogers. GOP Senate candidates in the agricultural Midwest are facing pressure on what is often considered their home ground as tariffs and the impact of the Iran war push up prices.
A recent survey by Pew Research shows that inflation is the dominant concern of voters, and that tariffs are viewed by 56 per cent of respondents as having a "mostly negative" effect on the country, including 26 per cent of all Republican respondents.
Of course, tariffs are hardly the only driver of inflation right now. The increase in prices of gasoline and diesel has also fuelled rising discontent. What tariff policy and the Iran war share is that they are a result of policy choices that have led to an interruption or cessation of global trade. This might have happened intentionally, as with tariffs, or as a risk embraced without care for the consequences, as in the case of the Iran war. They are events economists call "negative supply shocks," ie events that result in higher prices, and in more severe cases, outright shortages.
But aside from the dry jargon of economists, such "negative supply shocks" have become a central part of the experience of ordinary Americans and of political discourse. And this has been the case ever since Covid, when shortages of semiconductors (among many other products) rippled through the global economy.
The White House's problem is that tariffs and the war have become signature elements of the administration's foreign policy, and are now seen by a majority of the American public as having increased the threat of shortages and inflation. Meanwhile, even in the 2024 election, the broad state of the economy was the top concern, while "trade with other nations" didn't even crack the top ten.
Did politicians take notice of this shift in focus? Scott Bessent, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last May, diagnosing the economic malaise afflicting many Americans, wrote that "even as the price of consumer goods declined, the cost of living increased as housing, education and medical-insurance costs soared." Not much global trade going on in US housing, education and medical-insurance costs, so maybe? No. Bessent argues that the rise in costs across these largely non-tradeable sectors amounted to a "national rupture caused by globalization."
There's little doubt that the globalisation of trade had concentrated effects in certain regions of the US, particularly in the Midwest and Southeast. And the Midwest has functioned as the fulcrum of American national politics for more than a decade. This may have amplified political incentives to focus on trade, particularly because solutions to problems in healthcare, housing, and higher education -- the non-tradeable sectors identified by Bessent -- appear beyond the realm of cross-party, or even intraparty, political agreement.
However, this strategy might have reached its limits for three reasons. The first is that serial disruptions to international trade (whether caused by pandemics, tariffs or war) have led to sufficiently broad-based negative outcomes for two key constituencies. Consumers in general have suffered from higher prices in the wake of negative supply shocks, and American farmers and ranchers in particular have suffered from retaliation (through tariffs or other measures) that cost them access to export markets.
Second, the political map of the US seems to have shifted from where it had settled over the past decade, potentially putting other states "in play," including those in the agricultural Midwest. These are states that have been winners from global trade, and voters seem to be increasingly perturbed by the impact of tariffs and wars on the economy. Texas, America's champion exporter, has a Chamber of Commerce whose slogan is "Trade Is Good" and the situation here looks similar.
And last, if globalisation has become less neuralgic, longstanding concerns about the price of healthcare and housing persist, with the latter exacerbated by the jump in mortgage interest rates. Indeed, in a recent comment, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff explicitly vowed to repeal tariffs because they had led to price increases while vowing to tackle inflation in America's largest (and essentially non-tradeable) sector -- healthcare.
This election season may well coincide with the peak of broad anti-globalisation sentiment as a driver of US domestic politics.