It’s become an article of faith for trade hardliners in both parties that a protectionist agenda is a guaranteed pathway to building support among working-class voters. But now that President Donald Trump is testing that theory in practice, it is largely flopping on the campaign trail.
Trump has pursued the most confrontational trade agenda of any president since at least William McKinley at the end of the 19th century, and by the estimation of some historians, even Thomas Jefferson around its beginning.
But even in heavily blue-collar states and House districts that were long believed to be the most receptive to a protectionist agenda, Democrats almost uniformly have been comfortable this year running against the Trump tariffs, while Republicans have struggled to defend them. Even Democrats who are deeply skeptical of free trade agreements — like Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown and Brian Poindexter, the ironworker running against Rep. Max Miller for an Ohio House seat — have been unreserved in condemning the Trump tariffs. Polls by CNN and other media organizations consistently show that far more Americans believe the tariffs have hurt rather than helped their financial bottom line — and that consensus extends even to working-class white voters without a four-year college degree.
All this marks a fundamental shift in the politics of trade that could loosen Trump’s hold on the working-class voters at the core of his coalition — and allow Democrats this fall to recover some of the ground they have lost in blue-collar and rural places. Trump’s skepticism about the North American Free Trade Agreement and other moves to lower trade barriers clearly helped power his historic gains in blue-collar communities during his initial 2016 race and his first presidential term. But his sweeping second-term tariffs — which exceed even the wish lists that other protectionist presidential candidates have put forward since the 1970s — appear to be bleeding Republican support, even in those working-class places. “Everyone else talked about it, but Trump did it,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank. “And voters are like: ‘no thanks.’”
The most protectionist president in modern history
For decades, a steady procession of presidential hopefuls in both parties had offered a tough-on-trade message and an assortment of policies to restrict imports. That list extends from Republican John Connally in 1980 to Democrats Walter Mondale and Richard Gephardt in the 1980s to GOP insurgent Patrick J. Buchanan and independent candidate Ross Perot in the 1990s.
But before Trump, none of them won the presidency — and with it the ability to implement a protectionist agenda. Presidents of both parties have often provided some protection to American industries threatened by foreign competitors. But the general pattern since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s has been that Republican and Democratic presidents alike have generally defended free trade, while the protectionist impulse has been confined mostly to Congress, notes Douglas Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College and historian of American trade policy.
Trump’s willingness to impose tariffs on a panoramic list of US trading partners is unmatched since McKinley in the 1890s, says Alan Tonelson, a longtime manufacturing trade policy analyst and advocate for import restrictions. Irwin thinks Trump outmatches even McKinley: He believes Trump is pursuing the most confrontational trade policy since Jefferson imposed an (ultimately disastrous) 1807 embargo on all commerce with both England and Napoleon-era France in protest of their attacks on American shipping during their worldwide conflict. “There’s been no president in modern history who has used the tariff threat nearly as much as Donald Trump,” says Irwin.
Stanley Greenberg, a longtime Democratic pollster who has studied the party’s diminishing support among working-class white voters since the 1980s, says that Trump’s hardline approach on trade contributed to his 2016 breakthroughs against Hillary Clinton in battered blue-collar communities that had, in many cases, previously voted for Barack Obama during his two presidential victories.
“Hillary got hurt and Obama got hurt by not understanding these sentiments in the industrial Midwest,” Greenberg says. “And Trump used that to his advantage to win the election in 2016 and it was a fundamental part of his presidency in the first term, in which the association of him going after bad trade agreements and him championing tariffs” allowed him to present himself as a champion of “forgotten” working-class voters.
In his first term, Trump sharply veered from the preponderantly free trade outlook of his three immediate predecessors: Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Trump renegotiated NAFTA, the free trade agreement that Clinton pushed through Congress; scrapped the pan-Asian free trade agreement that Obama had negotiated (but never submitted to Congress for fear of hurting Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election); and imposed tariffs primarily on steel and aluminum imports from many countries as well as a wide array of products from China.
But all that was barely an overture for Trump’s second term. To a far greater extent than in his first term, Trump has levied, withdrawn and reimposed tariffs; brandished threats; and launched investigations in a bewildering blur that has upended the rules of trade with dozens of countries. He has moved as aggressively against allies, such as Canada and the European Union, as against traditional trade adversaries such as China.
Before Trump, Holtz-Eakin notes, many political leaders believed “the politics were good” for protectionism, “but the foreign policy implications were bad.” As a result, “no Republican would go there,” he says. “But Trump didn’t care about the latter. So, we’ve (been able) to see the economics in isolation.” And the reaction has been very different than what Trump — and other trade hawks — expected.
Tariffs seemed more popular in theory than they are in practice
Since at least the 1970s, the dominant assumption in each party has been that trade issues divided the public along educational lines, with college-educated voters the most likely to favor expanding trade and working-class voters most receptive to a protectionist message of restricting imports to try to protect domestic manufacturing jobs.
That traditional divide persisted even as Trump returned to office. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ annual foreign policy polling, for instance, found that in 2025 nearly two-thirds of whites without a college degree preferred a trade policy that imposed restrictions on imports to protect jobs over an approach that minimized restrictions to lower prices. Whites with a college degree split evenly over which approach they preferred; notably, however, in a sharp departure from their white counterparts, a slight majority of nonwhites without a college degree preferred a trade policy that focused on costs. College-educated nonwhites were the most skeptical of all toward restrictions.
But as Trump has implemented his tariffs, they have proven less attractive for most Americans in practice than in theory. In Pew polling this January, 60% of Americans opposed his tariff increases; more than twice as many said it had affected their family negatively as positively. In a CNN/SSRS poll this April, four times as many Americans said the tariffs had hurt their personal finances as said they’d helped. Recent polls in Wisconsin and Ohio, two heavily working-class, manufacturing-oriented states, both found about 60% of residents opposed the tariffs. Polls released this month have found overwhelming opposition to Trump’s latest trade war against Canada, particularly in states along the border: In CNN surveys, about two-thirds or more of voters in both Michigan and Maine said the new Canadian tariffs were bad for their state.
In many of these surveys, whites without a four-year college degree remained relatively more sympathetic to Trump’s approach than other groups; in January’s Pew survey, for instance, they split evenly on whether they approved of the tariffs.
But even that represents much more resistance than Trump usually faces among a group that supported him by 2:1 margins in all three of his presidential races. And polls consistently find that even most whites without a four-year degree believe the tariffs have hurt their personal bottom line. In the April CNN/SRSS poll, for instance, nearly three times as many non-college whites said the tariffs had hurt as helped their finances. Big majorities of non-college whites opposed the Canada tariffs in both Maine and Michigan.
Other groups were even more lopsided in their opposition. In CNN’s national polling, two-thirds of Black voters and three-fourths of Hispanics said the tariffs had hurt their finances. So did about 7 in 10 college-educated whites. In Maine, college-educated whites opposed the Canada tariffs by more than 11 to 1.
Even supporters like Tonelson agree part of the problem for the tariffs has been the erratic, unpredictable way Trump has imposed, removed and restored them. “It is an unnerving spectacle to a needless extent,” he says.
But many agree the bigger obstacle for the tariffs is that Trump is advancing them at a moment when voters’ top concern is the struggle with persistently high costs. “He’s decided to do these tariffs in such a way that jumped up prices … at a time of unbelievable anger about the high cost of living,” Greenberg says. The receptivity to tough trade measures evident in Trump’s first term, he adds, “has been completely blown away by this new period of inflation.”
Wisconsin-based Republican strategist Mark Graul agrees. The tariff agenda is not working for Trump and the GOP, he says, for a straightforward reason: “because it is being blamed for the higher prices that people are experiencing.”
Trump’s core problem is a mismatch between losers and winners
Even more than the polls, the actions of politicians capture how the politics of trade have shifted.
It’s probably not a surprise that the tariffs face intense criticism from Josh Turek and Adam Hamilton, the Democratic Senate candidates in Iowa and Kansas, as well as Dan Osborn, the populist independent running in Nebraska. High tariffs have always been unpopular in farm states because of fears of foreign retaliation against agricultural exports.
More revealing is the opposition to the Trump tariffs from Democrats running in burly manufacturing states where many voters have long been skeptical of free trade deals.
In Michigan, for instance, the Democratic nominees for governor (Jocelyn Benson) and Senate (Abdul El-Sayed) have both denounced their Republican opponents for supporting Trump’s tariffs, especially the new levies on Canada. Democratic Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet, who represents a struggling blue-collar district around Flint, recently blamed Trump’s “chaotic tariff regime” and “reckless” trade policies for the closure of a semiconductor manufacturing plant in her district. “It’s that chaos that causes businesses to close,” she charged.
Poindexter, the ironworker seeking a House seat south of Cleveland, is running a new football-themed ad promising to “block the bad trade deals.” But an in interview, Poindexter said that while he would have voted against NAFTA had he been in Congress at the time, “what we’ve seen with the blanket tariffs is it’s driven up costs on working families.”
“I think tariffs can be very useful in leveling the playing field,” he added. “But it makes no sense to tariff things we don’t produce in America.”
Perhaps most striking has been the reaction from former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is opposing Republican Sen. Jon Husted this year. No Democrat has a longer pedigree of criticizing free trade than Brown. Yet he too says flatly, “These tariffs have clearly not worked. … People everywhere are paying more for everything and this new batch of tariffs against Canada is (taking) a disastrous policy and making even more of a disaster.”
Against this onslaught, hardly any Republicans have broken with Trump (with Sen. Susan Collins’ careful criticism of the Canada tariffs an exception). The vast majority of House and Senate Republicans have repeatedly voted to defend the tariffs. “Look, these tariffs are working,” Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall insisted to loud boos during a raucous debate with Hamilton this month.
Tonelson, too, argues that “from an economic point of view, it’s gone very well.” He points to an increase in total manufacturing output during Trump’s second term. But that level is still lower than at points of Trump’s first term and Barack Obama’s second.
In any case, the more politically relevant measure is how many people are working in manufacturing. And on that front, despite gains in recent months, slightly fewer people are employed in manufacturing now (12.638 million) than when Trump returned to office (12.673 million), according to federal statistics. That’s only about 7.5% of all workers. Manufacturing employment today, in fact, is only slightly higher than when Trump first took office in 2017. “Even people who were saying (at first), ‘I want to give him the benefit of the doubt,’ will say ‘it’s just not paying off,’” says Eva Kemp, director of paid media and partnerships at American Bridge, a Democratic-aligned group that focuses on working-class voters.
Those employment numbers point to a deeper vulnerability. The backlash against Trump’s levies suggests that a protectionist agenda faces a fundamental mismatch between winners and losers. The best-case for Trump’s tariffs is that they might eventually add a few hundred thousand more manufacturing jobs. But the number of people who might get those jobs — someday — will always be dwarfed by the number paying higher prices today. “Even if it’s absolutely the right thing to do, it’s really, really hard to persuade people who are responding to the upfront costs,” says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and longtime Democratic policy analyst.
Even after Trump, Democrats seem unlikely to return to the Obama/Bill Clinton enthusiasm for free trade agreements. But, as Galston says, on tariffs, the next Democratic president is likely to replace Trump’s “sledgehammer with the scalpel.” The bigger question may be whether the protectionist tide that has been surging in the GOP under Trump starts to recede if his tariffs cost some congressional Republicans their own jobs in November.
