Im-Politic: Where Do the Social Conservatives Really Stand on Trade?

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1992 election, 2016 elections, conservatives, Donald Trump, Gary Bauer, George H.W. Bush, Iowa, NBC News, New Hampshire, Pat Buchanan, Pew Research Center, Phyllis Schlafly, Republicans, social conservatives, South Carolina, Tea Party, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, {What's Left of) Our Economy

A new Wall Street Journal feature comparing the beliefs of Donald Trump’s supporters with those of backers of other leading Republican presidential candidates deserves high marks for graphic ingenuity. For accuracy? I’m less sure about that. Not that anyone should have excessive expectations of opinion polls’ accuracy, but this particular exercise seems off-base in describing how social conservative voters view American trade policy – which is shaping up as an important issue in this election year.

The Journal‘s analysis groups Republican voters into three categories: Trump-ites, fans of “establishment” candidates like former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and the social conservatives. So far, so good. Ditto for the findings that by a 55 percent-45 percent margin Trump voters consider “free trade” to be “bad for the U.S.” and the establishment-arians viewing such trade as beneficial by 72 percent to 28 percent.

But The Journal‘s claim that 59 percent of social conservatives hold positive views of trade and only 41 percent oppose it contrasts with years of survey data on the issue, as well as with my personal experience in trade politics – which isn’t negligible.

The political world first got wind of social conservatism’s take on trade issues in 1992, when former Nixon White House speechwriter-turned-pundit Pat Buchanan challenged incumbent President George H.W. Bush in that year’s Republican primaries largely due to Bush’s ardent support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Uruguay Round global deal that ultimately created the World Trade Organization.

In 1997, opinion data appeared indicating that the Buchanan revolt was no passing fad. That year, the respected Fabrizio-McLaughlin firm issued a fascinating study that examined most of the major fissures then rending (and continuing to roil) the Republican party. Unfortunately, I can’t find it on line, but I wrote about it in detail, and one of the main findings was strong social conservative opposition to the main thrust of American trade policy.

Moreover, during my involvement back in the 1990s in many of that decade’s big Washington trade battles, social conservative organizations and their leaders were always among the staunchest opponents of these deals. In addition to Buchanan, their ranks included Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, and most have stayed active on the issue ever since.

In addition, numerous polls make as clear as possible that their grassroots are solidly with these figures. In 2007, The Journal and its survey partner, NBC News, released the results of a study that didn’t track social conservatives’ trade views explicitly, but attributed rising Republican opposition to status quo trade policies to “the changing composition of the Republican electorate as social conservatives have grown in influence.”

The Tea Party movement that energized so many Republicans and conservatives after the financial crisis has always been difficult to type economically, as a libertarian wing and a social conservative wing have both emerged. But despite this split, one 2010 poll showed strong support among avowed members of the movement for trade policy positions that strongly resemble those of organized labor, and another – again by The Journal and NBC News – revealed that a higher percentage of professed Tea Party-ers (61 percent) agreed that trade agreements had hurt the United States than Americans overall (53 percent).

The most thoroughgoing and valuable research on this front, however, has been conducted by the Pew Research Center, which since 1987 has recognized that the standard liberal-conservative typology is no longer remotely adequate for analyzing American politics. As early as 1989, Pew detected strong support among a category it labeled “Republican moralists” (along with “God & Country Democrats”) for increasing tariffs on Japanese goods to counter Tokyo’s allegedly unfair trade practices and grave concerns about the impact of foreign ownership of American assets.

Fast forward to 2014, and a Pew survey found that “Steadfast Conservatives,” who it defined as holding “very conservative social values,” were the most likely of the six major American political groupings it identified to believe that “free trade agreements are a bad thing for the U.S.” (Intriguingly, the same phrasing used by the latest Wall Street Journal survey.) In fact, these conservatives were the only category featuring majority (51 percent) agreement with this statement.

Of course, precisely because polling remains far more an art than a science, it’s entirely possible that the new Journal survey is right and all the other polls are wrong. But even for the public opinion business, that would be unusual. Meanwhile, we’re not likely to get much confirmation of these trends in the upcoming Iowa caucuses, since, as I’ve just explained, even though its Republican activist ranks are heavily social conservative, the state is one of the few in America that’s gained on net from the kinds of trade policies Trump in particular has assailed. A better test looks like South Carolina, which also boasts lots of social conservatives and which has suffered huge trade-related losses in recent decades.

Im-Politic: Why Populists Look Strong in Iowa & New Hampshire

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2016 election, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Donald Trump, Im-Politic, Iowa, New Hampshire, primaries, Republicans, Trade, trade balances, wages, work week

Reporters who cover presidential politics seem think they’ve discovered a major paradox surrounding Iowa and New Hampshire, whose caucus and primary kick off the voting phase of the Republican and Democratic nomination campaigns: Although both states could well hand victories to populist candidates Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders, both boast unemployment rates well below the national average.

A closer look at their economies, however, reveals a more complicated picture that could better explain the appeal of the Republican real estate magnate and the self-described Democratic Socialist Vermont Senator.

As tweeted by the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, “As Iowa and New Hampshire voters surge toward populist candidates, the unemployment rate in each state: 3.4%, 3.1%.” Both are indeed below the national rate of five percent reported most recently by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and many of his colleagues re-tweeted these findings.

But job quality is a major concern of voters, too, and although Iowa has also excelled in this respect, New Hampshire has under-performed. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average weekly wages in the United States overall rose by 7.80 percent before inflation between the fourth quarter of 2007 (when the last recession began) and the second quarter of 2015 (the latest available data for individual states). In Iowa, the improvement was a much better 9.40 percent. In New Hampshire, however, this measure of pay increased by only 5.68 percent.

Further, over a seven-and-a-half year period, those are pretty paltry numbers for both states, and the figures don’t even count the mild erosion that results from factoring in the official inflation rate. Even worse, these current dollar weekly wage figures had fallen for three straight quarters in both states. As a result, the appeal of populism becomes a good deal less mysterious.

Because weekly wages can change due to the length of the work week, it also pays to look at the hourly wage figures. Based on the weekly hours totals available for the two states and the nation as a whole, hourly wages in the United States advanced by 7.88 percent between the fourth quarter of 2007 through the second quarter of 2015. This rate was slightly faster than the weekly improvement, because the work week shortened from 34.53 hours to 34.50.

In Iowa hourly wages increased by 7.99 percent. This figure was somewhat smaller than the weekly wage improvement, as the state’s average work week lengthened from 34.26 to 34.70 hours. In New Hampshire, the work week lengthened, too, and also pushed the hourly wage advance down to 4.54 percent. Again, these figures are unimpressive over so many years, and could go far toward explaining the strong poll results racked up by Trump and Sanders.

Another neglected measure of state economic performance produces a more mixed picture – on exports, imports, and trade balances. Iowa is one of only 17 states whose international trade contributed to its growth. Between 2009 (when the current economic recovery began) and 2014 (the latest available figures) it not only ran a goods trade surplus, but that surplus widened – from $3.55 billion to $4.54 billion. New Hampshire, by contrast saw its merchandise deficit worsen considerably – from $3.26 billion to $6.99 billion – meaning that it subtracted from the state’s growth.

Of course, many factors, economic and non-economic, will determine the final Iowa and New Hampshire votes, and even when measuring state economies, overall data can obscure significant intra-state variations that can influence the electorates’ perspectives and turnout rates. But if Trump and Sanders perform as expected in these early contests, the wage and trade statistics will bolster the case that, jobless rates notwithstanding, the dreary U.S. economic recovery was very much on voters’ minds

Im-Politic: A Profile in Campaign Outsourcing Posturing, Not Courage

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2014 elections, China, currency manipulation, free trade agreements, Im-Politic, Jeanne Shaheen, Jobs, New Hampshire, offshoring, outsourcing, Scott Brown, Senate, Trade

The Washington Post‘s E.J. Dionne was right as rain when he wrote in his latest column that “What’s not being widely talked about [in this year’s midterm election campaign] is as important as what’s in the news.” Only he should have added that, at least when it comes to the “outsourcing of American jobs,” office-seekers still aren’t talking about the issues seriously. Indeed, the examples he cites of this subject’s treatment matter most for the political cynicism they expose.

The most prominent case of (unwitting) outsourcing-related hypocrisy mentioned by Dionne:  New Hampshire Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s claim to be a champion of turning foreign job creation by U.S. business into domestic job creation. Worse, her two-faced position is actually two (closely related) two-faced positions.

The first con job Shaheen is trying to pull involves blaming the migration of jobs overseas on “tax breaks for…companies that ship jobs overseas….” As should be clear by now, this popular meme is a fake. There are no such laws – or at least no such laws that expressly seek this goal. Politicians voicing this complaint are really talking about deductions for business expenses – which include any relocation.

In addition, even if offshoring-focused tax breaks did exist, the idea that they’ve been central to the story of American jobs’ exodus is simply idiotic. Are Shaheen and others like her saying that a high-income country like the United States can and should compete on the tax front with very low-income countries like China, which have been the recipients of so many of these jobs? That would be a heckuva novel stand for liberal Democrats.

Moreover, this tax-centric view ignores all the other international asymmetries responsible for job flight overseas – like foreign trade barriers and subsidies aimed at attracting jobs and production, currency manipulation, penny wages (whether caused by repression of unions, super-low overall cost levels, or some combination of the two), poorly enforced or nonexistent environmental and worker safety regulations, and national business models prioritizing production and exporting over consumption and importing.’

Which brings us to the second of Shaheen’s canards – her apparent determination to ignore the agreements and other U.S. trade policy decisions that inevitably plunge American workers into a no-win competition with their counterparts from countries practicing the above.

Why the blindspot? No doubt because Shaheen has a mixed voting record at best on trade policy. She’s supported expanding Buy American requirements for federally funded infrastructure projects. But she also voted for the recent, job-killing trade deals with Korea and Columbia, favored Russia’s admission into the World Trade Organization (not much of an offshoring engine, but wildly premature), and was MIA on the measure that would sanction currency manipulation by China and other countries.

Not that New Hampshire voters have much of a choice in this regard. Sen. Shaheen’s Republican opponent, Scott Brown, had an almost identical record during his brief tenure representing neighboring Massachusetts in the Senate. The one big exception: He supported the currency manipulation bill – which is noteworthy given the Republican Congressional leadership’s staunch opposition to this measure.

So a cheer and a half for Dionne for spotlighting the incredible lightness of Election 2014’s being.  But how can future campaigns get any better if even America’s supposed watchdog media can’t tell the Real McCoys from the phonies?