The nearly two dozen Democratic candidates running for president overwhelmingly agree that Donald Trump’s trade policies have failed.
They’re just not ready to say what they’d do about it.
Of the 14 contenders who attended the California Democratic Party convention this weekend, only one, Senator Kamala Harris, addressed the issue. She condemned Trump’s recent threat to impose tariffs on Mexican goods but didn’t offer any policy prescriptions of her own.
This relative silence leaves two constituencies crucial to winning back the White House -- union members and rural voters -- open to being wooed by Trump’s get-tough approach, much as they were when he faced Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“Trade policy by tweet does not work,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said last month in Newton, Iowa. “The kind of chaos and tit-for-tat that Donald Trump is engaged in is imposing an enormous cost on farmers right here in Iowa and people all across this country. This makes no sense.”
The escalating dispute between the U.S. and China, as well as Trump’s willingness to go after Mexico, the U.S.’s second-biggest trading partner, have made trade a hot topic. Yet most Democratic contenders, including Warren, are avoiding substantive policy proposals.
That’s because an embrace of tariffs and other barriers could alienate rural voters in areas that are heavily dependent on agricultural exports. But favoring more open trade could make it hard to recapture blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt who have turned away in recent years, blaming the Democrats’ support of globalization for the collapse of U.S. manufacturing.
Divisive Issue
“Trade is divisive and hence there might be an incentive to say, ‘Hey, let’s kick that down the road a little bit and let’s get a few things out that may be popular across the board,’” said Andy Green, managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Green said the candidates are prioritizing policy proposals on issues where there is more agreement within the party like health care, housing and climate change. But he said progressives are also going through an “intellectual transition” on trade, as they grapple with the downward pressure on wages that some say is partly a legacy of the laissez-faire agenda of the Democratic administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.