US protectionism is a bust -- Mississippi edition

Democrats are not about to convert to free trade, though they'll try to claw back some tariff authority from Trump

It is far too soon to proclaim the rebound of American free trade. It is not too early to declare protectionism's failure. The backlash against Donald Trump's tariffs played a key role in last week's Democratic tsunami. Even in Mississippi, which on Wednesday confirmed it had elected its first Democratic senator since 1982, anti-tariff sentiment played a role. Two viral advertisements, both related to tariffs, supplied the Democrat Scott Colom with the name recognition he needed to win. The first, which I recommend you watch, was an ingenious riposte to the sitting Republican senator's advice that Mississippians should "pick another protein" when she was asked about rising beef prices. "Pick another protein?" says a disabled military veteran as he flips a burger on the grill. "Sheeeit. I'd rather pick another senator instead." The second ad, which was almost as good, complains about tariffs hurting local farmers. Mississippi's first black senator since Reconstruction thus won partly because of his free trade advocacy. You have got to love American politics.

A couple of days later, I spoke about the midterms at a conference in Ottawa. When I told the Canadian immigration officer the reason for my visit, he replied: "What about Kansas, eh?" The Democratic win there was also quite something. Adam Hamilton, the pastor who unseated Roger Marshall to become his party's first senator from that state since 1932, made a big fuss about Trump's "hidden tax". The US president's tariffs were costing Kansas households $150-$250 a month, Hamilton said. Much the same happened in Maine, where the five-term Republican senator, Susan Collins, is not so much a local name as an ancient Maine habit. She was felled partly because of trade. Trump's tariffs on Canada hit several Maine industries, including seafood and heating oil. Cross-border tourism has also plummeted. In a debate exchange that also went viral, Collins boasted that she had successfully lobbied to get road salt exempted from Trump's tariffs. "We can't eat road salt," said her opponent, Troy Jackson. Denouncing the Canada tariffs was likewise not enough to save Mike Rogers, the Republican Michigan candidate, partly because it did not differentiate him from Abdul El-Sayed, the winning Democrat and America's first Muslim senator. I haven't yet mentioned Iowa . . . Anyway, you get the drift.

Alas, the protectionists around Trump are insisting that the trade war had nothing to do with their defeat. This included JD Vance, who did not cite tariffs among the four things he blamed for the Republican loss. He put it all on Iran with a bit of Israel thrown in. I had a polite disagreement on the role of tariffs with Oren Cass, head of the protectionist think-tank American Compass, on an FT webinar earlier this week. Swampians might enjoy watching the full session, which offered a midterm postmortem. My colleagues Derek Brower and Rana Foroohar, and the American Enterprise Institute's Kori Schake, were also on the panel.

Cass's view that tariffs had nothing to do with the Republican defeat reminded me of what the communists used to say: it wasn't that communism had failed; it just hadn't been properly tried. Either way, there is a growing Republican split between those who hold Iran culpable for their recent cataclysm versus those who blame tariffs. I think they are dwelling too much on their ideological differences and not enough the thoughts and habits of what their leader used to call the "forgotten Americans". This poses a big worry for a party that has been successfully painting Democrats as out-of-touch elites. For more on that and on why Reagan Republicans are feeling less extinct than they were two weeks ago, read this insightful piece by The Dispatch's Jonah Goldberg.

But I have a health warning. Democrats are not about to convert to free trade. They will try to claw back some tariff authority from a trigger-happy Trump but will not be pushing any time soon for a revival of the World Trade Organization. The best they can probably do is team up with pragmatic Republicans to undo Trump's tariffs on Canada. The US and Canada are too intertwined for that trade war to qualify as anything other than foolish self-harm. Either way, the jury is back in on Trump's tariffs even if it has offered no clear verdict on the Democrats' less anarchic form of US protectionism.

As my colleague Alan Beattie wrote in this powerful op-ed on how "Donald Trump has taught the world why tariffs are useless", the world has adapted surprisingly well to America's protectionist turn. Unlike in the 1930s, when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act triggered a tit-for-tat spiral that helped demolish what was left of the Treaty of Versailles, the rest of the world carried on making trade deals. As Adam Tooze quipped, globalisation does not stop until Eurasia says it does. Far from copying America, the world has been accelerating regional and bilateral trade deals in the past few years. That might change, however, if Europe continues to wake up to the fact that China is eating its lunch. Thereby also lies the likely direction of future Democratic protectionism, which I will address in another note.

I am turning this week to my colleague Aime Williams, who is our Washington-based trade and climate correspondent. Since I moved back to the US in 2006, the bipartisan direction has almost been entirely against globalisation in its many forms. Last week was the strongest countervailing sign so far. Aime, you are far more clued up than me on Capitol Hill's trade politics. Do you see any signs of a coherent Democratic view on trade?

* Talking of wars, my column this week was on how Trump is turning towards the Alamo. "Anyone who was hoping that Trump would play the role of a lame duck and not an angry one has been put on notice," I write.

* In the FT, both John Gapper's Big Read on the very worrying "Great British sell off" and Jill R Shah and Amelia Pollard's piece on Ken Griffin's $5bn Miami takeover are models of long-form journalism.

* I would also strongly urge those who care about free speech and its enemies on all sides of the contemporary western spectrum to read George Packer's Atlantic essay "When writers lose faith in free speech". Writers who embrace a political or ideological team cease to be interesting and valuable writers, he argues. As AI begins to swamp the human act of writing -- and the thought that goes into that writing -- our capacity to think is in jeopardy.

* Finally, permit me one indulgence. My mother-in-law, Irene King, and mother to my wife, Niamh, died last week. She was one of a kind. Irene's extraordinary funeral took place in Chicago on Monday, November 2, the day before the midterms. We all wished she could have seen the result. Here is my obituary of Irene.

Aime Williams replies

Thanks Ed. The first significant thing I'd love to note is that although I agree that Republicans are split between those who blame Iran and those who blame tariffs for the midterms drubbing, it's hard to find the anti-tariff voices within the administration itself. As one person close to the White House drily pointed out to me this week, you don't get to work for Tariff Man by being down on tariffs.

The question, then, for the next two years, is one of scope and focus. I think the wild days of blanket high tariffs aimed at almost all US trading partners are behind us. The excesses of Peter Navarro, one of Trump's most protectionist aides, will be firmly contained. But Jamieson Greer, Trump's top trade negotiator, genuinely believes that tariffs can reinvigorate US manufacturing, and he's also a serious-minded China hawk. US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, too, has been playing hardball with allies over steel and aluminium tariffs. We can expect to see more duties rolled out in coming months.

As for the Democrats, I'd say the dust is settling. Their difficulty is that they broadly campaigned by attacking Trump's tariffs, but many of them are quite fond of tariffs themselves -- think of Sherrod Brown, one of the OG Democratic trade protectionists, who just won a hard-fought battle to regain his old Senate seat in Vance's home state of Ohio. Working out how to convince a US electorate that is so firmly against tariffs (and I've spoken to plenty of voters who tell me this) that some tariffs are OK will be tough. I think the trick will be to try and peel tariffs away from the broader affordability problem -- and that seems almost impossible to do at this juncture. And then, as you say, isolating China and articulating the problems caused to US industry by China's state subsidies is another fruitful Democratic avenue.

One thing that all of the Democrats on the Hill seem united by at the moment is their anti-corruption zeal. They are primed to chase after any suggestion of self-enriching that might have been hidden away in any of the tariff exemptions or investments made by foreign governments. So many of the details of those remain vague, and it'll be fascinating -- to say the least -- when we start to see the subpoenas fly.