Voters in manufacturing-heavy swing states tend to favor non-incumbent candidates.
There’s new research out that could offer insight into what might happen at the ballot box this November — and the role that trade and manufacturing will play.
Georgetown University researchers J. Bradford Jensen, Dennis P. Quinn and Stephen J. Weymouth studied county-level election results since 1992 and national results since 1936 to analyze how international trade impacts U.S. presidential voting. What they found is that the share of the vote decreases for the incumbent party in counties that have higher concentrations of jobs in low-skill manufacturing — but it increases in places with greater concentrations of jobs in “high-skilled tradable goods and services.”
This is important, considering the role manufacturing jobs play in swing states, as The Wall Street Journal explains:
“[T]he study shows that incumbent parties are especially vulnerable in presidential swing states, which have higher concentrations of jobs in low-skilled manufacturing. This negative effect on the incumbent vote share is nearly three times as large as it is in nonswing states, which leads to a stronger incentive to protect this sector.”
The research helps explain why both Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton are spending so much time talking about trade and manufacturing on the campaign trail — both campaigns are well aware that manufacturing matters to voters in places like Ohio.
It also shows why Trump’s tough trade messaging isn’t working as well in places like North Carolina. While textile and furniture manufacturing was once a key part of the state’s economy, industries that have benefitted from trade have seen significant growth in recent years, particularly in urban areas.
The Georgetown paper isn’t the first to examine trade’s impact on voters. Economist David Autor and his colleagues David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi released a paper earlier this year that found congressional districts that were effected by job losses because of trade elected candidates who are more ideologically extreme.
Autor, Dorn and Hanson previously collaborated on the “China Shock” paper that outlined the unprecedented job loss that hit America’s blue collar communities after China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO). In their latest paper, the authors found that the job loss is having a major impact at the ballot box, as both Republicans and Democrats are voting out moderates and replacing them with candidates who have strong ideological views.
As Autor explained:
“Imagine you have two groups of people, liberals and conservatives, and they share the same objective: They want workers to be employed and protected from the shocks of globalization. And then you have a big [trade] shock, and a lot of people lose employment. You might think everyone should converge on what we should do about that. But you can have a setting where beliefs are sufficiently disjointed, such that the same information is interpreted in completely different ways by people observing it.”
So, for example, liberals might want an expansion of the social safety net to protect those workers, while conservatives might want strong nationalistic policies.
And that’s what we see happening in the presidential contest, Autor argued.
“The 2016 presidential election shows the parties are not able to maintain discipline and stop people from moving to populist solutions [on trade] that most politicians don’t like — they’ve lost control of that dialogue,” Autor said. “But our paper makes clear that this process was well under way throughout the 2000s.”
Of course, the 2016 presidential campaign has thrown a lot of assumptions out the window. There are a lot of other things happening in the Trump v. Clinton contest that are impacting how voters are viewing both candidates that likely will have an impact in November.
Once again, we will state for the record that the Alliance for American Manufacturing is a nonpartisan institution, so we aren’t endorsing any candidate. But this research is tremendously important, as it shows us that trade and manufacturing jobs remain hugely important to voters, especially in swing states.
If one thing is certain in 2016, it is that Clinton and Trump are likely to continue to fight to be considered the top candidate for swing state voters on these issues.