In a stunning reversal, a large majority of Republicans are repudiating their party’s traditional support for free trade, and falling sharply in line with nominee Donald Trump’s insistence that trade costs Americans more jobs than it creates.

Meanwhile, Democrats, whose representatives in Congress have traditionally been far more skeptical of trade deals — and largely voted against giving President Barack Obama the “fast-track” authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership last year — are now far more apt than Republicans to see the benefit of trade, according to an exclusive poll conducted for POLITICO and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.


Forty-seven percent of Republicans surveyed said that trade deals have hurt their communities over the last 10 years, compared to only 24 percent of Democratic voters. Only 18 percent of Republicans surveyed said that trade deals helped, while 33 percent of Democrats believe free trade helps.

The poll results, which come ahead of Monday night’s highly anticipated presidential debate, show a stark turnabout in public opinion from a decade ago, when George W. Bush was president and Republican lawmakers — with the notable exception of some lawmakers from textile industry states — championed free trade. In 2006, a Pew Research Center poll showed Democrats — who traditionally have stronger ties with organized labor — to be considerably more negative about free trade than Republicans.

Now, the POLITICO-Harvard poll shows, 85 percent of Republicans say that free trade has cost the U.S. more jobs than it has created, compared to 54 percent of Democrats.

Trade has “gone from the gold standard to being something that’s bad,” Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s former chief strategist, told POLITICO. “I think it’s a disaster across the board for the Republican Party, because you’re betting against all these trends [in globalization] that are not going to stop.”

“The reason people don’t like trade is the people at the top are not doing a good job of selling it,” says Stevens, who has worked for a slew of pro-trade Republicans through the years. Romney talked tough during his 2012 presidential bid about the need to force Beijing to change its trade practices, but held a fundamentally pro-trade view of the world.

But the problem isn’t salesmanship, says Peter Navarro, a senior policy adviser to Trump and an economist at the University of California, Irvine.

“There’s been a schism for a long time between registered Republicans and the party leadership. That was the essence of the primary election. You had a group of insider politicians singing the same old globalization song. And one candidate saying the emperor has no clothes,” he told POLITICO.

Beyond the presidential race, Republican voters’ journey away from free trade support has left several prominent GOP Senate candidates in a bind as they attempt to distance themselves from the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership deal between the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim countries. One is Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who has been a stalwart free trade backer but now faces a tough re-election and opposes TPP. Another is Ohio Sen. Rob Portman — an architect of Bush’s free trade agenda as his U.S. Trade Representative — who opposes a pact he might have once supported.

Ohio Democrats have slammed Portman for flip-flopping on the issue — and one observer of the race told POLITICO to watch for a considerable number of Ohioans to vote for both Trump and Portman’s Democratic opponent, Ted Strickland.

The trade numbers are just one of several findings that portray an electorate deeply divided about the state of the economy and increasingly hostile toward drug companies:

— The poll revealed that 56 percent of Americans think the economy has either stayed the same or deteriorated since the 2008 economic recession.

— There is a partisan split in how people view the income gap between rich and poor: 59 percent of Democrats view it as a “very serious problem,” and only 20 percent of Republicans say that.

— Americans are divided over what Congress should do to improve the economy, with almost equal numbers saying lawmakers should focus on narrowing the income gap (42 percent) and cutting taxes (40 percent). Democrats favor narrowing the income gap, while Republicans want to cut taxes.

— On health care, respondents identified drug companies as the No. 1 culprit for rising health costs. Democrats and Republicans alike hold the pharmaceutical industry responsible for rising costs more than any other health care sector, though that sentiment is stronger among Democrats.

— On another emerging hot-button issue, Americans favor creating a government-sponsored health insurance plan, or public option, as part of the Affordable Care Act — and not just Democrats. A slight majority (54 percent) of all Americans favor adding such a plan — and among Democrats, fully three-quarters back the idea, as do 52 percent of Independents. Among Republicans, 60 percent oppose the public option but more than one in four support it (26 percent).

The most striking poll results, however, demonstrate the changing perceptions of trade in a party that has long been identified with support for open markets and low tariffs.

Some Republicans downplay the idea that the party is becoming more protectionist. After all, 49 of 54 Senate Republicans supported legislation to allow fast-track approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But longtime skeptics of U.S. trade policy think Republican leaders are missing the point: that for years, the GOP voting coalition has not been as pro-trade as their elected leaders in Washington.

“You have a paradox in the Republican party versus the populist sentiments,” says Thea Lee, deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO. “For a long time big business has driven Republican members of Congress, and they’ve managed to keep the white working class happy with anti-immigration sentiments or social issues.”

“There’s always been a vulnerability in that position, and Donald Trump blew a massive whole in that position,” she says.

Both Trump and Bernie Sanders won big in the Michigan primary earlier this year, and the POLITICO-Harvard poll helps explain why. Regardless of party affiliation, 53 percent of respondents in the Midwest said free trade agreements hurt their communities.

Navarro, the Trump adviser, pegs the beginning of the change to 2000, when Congress voted to normalize trade relations with China as it prepared to enter the World Trade Organization. China’s accession occurred in 2001.

Navarro maintains that for more than a decade now, the Republican Party had abandoned its constituents, pursuing a slew of free trade deals that allowed foreign-made goods to flood U.S. markets.

“By 2012, Romney could’ve taken up that issue and won the swing states he needed to win the election but he allowed himself to be ensnared by secondary issues,” Navarro said, echoing Trump’s call for a renegotiation of NAFTA and huge tariffs on Chinese and Mexican goods. “That’s not going to happen to Donald Trump.”

The Peterson Institute for International Economics recently released a study saying Trump’s proposals could cause another recession and cost the U.S. five million jobs. The think tank’s researchers ran three computer simulations on the economic impact of Trump’s proposed tariffs on China and Mexico. The most extreme outcome, it finds, is that the two countries would return fire with their own tariffs, leading to a shrinkage in goods moving in and out of the United States.

Still, Trump wins wild applause from supporters for statements like this one in June: “NAFTA was the worst trade deal in history, and China's entrance into the World Trade Organization has enabled the greatest jobs theft in history.”

Just a decade ago, when a Republican was in the White House, a Pew Research poll found that 43 percent of Republicans believed trade agreements had helped the financial situation of their family, and that only 27 percent of Republicans said free trade agreements hurt them. Forty-one percent of Democrats at the time said free trade hurt their families, with 30 percent saying it helped.

Now, of course, there’s a Democrat in the White House, which may help explain the increase in GOP voter opposition to trade deals. But the global financial crisis also helped to hollow out some depressed working-class communities that had already been affected by outsourcing to China, Mexico and Vietnam. Trump’s proposals, and the fiery rhetoric in which he wraps these ideas, have captured the imagination of many in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Observers on both side of the political divide say that Trump’s anti-trade message has xenophobic undertones. Stevens calls Trump’s talk on China and Mexico the “economic leg of the anti-Mexican-Muslim stew. He’s normalized this kind of hate talk.”

Sixty-four percent of Republicans said that free trade with China hurts the United States, versus just 38 percent of Democrats. Free trade with Mexico evokes a similar response. A mere 17 percent of Democrats think free trade across the southern border hurts the country; the figure for Republicans is 61 percent.

Trade with Canada, the European Union, Japan and South Korea is far less concerning to respondents.

Still, the POLITICO-Harvard poll shows an across-the-board skepticism toward international trade, with 65 percent of Americans believing that trade policies have led to a loss of U.S. jobs. Just 13 percent believe trade policies created jobs and 15 percent said it had no effect.

It’s an ominous sign for TPP, in particular. The poll found that 70 percent of the surveyed had not heard or read anything about TPP — and out of the 29 percent that heard of TPP, more than half opposed Congress approving the deal.

And while the poll shows a Democratic base more open to free trade than it was a decade ago, the issue still evokes strong emotional reactions from some in the party’s most liberal wing. Sanders riled up an enthusiastic bloc of liberal voters in his primary challenge to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, pushing the former Secretary of State to the left. After previously supporting Asia-Pacific trade negotiations during her time in government, Clinton renounced the TPP deal in October 2015.

“We’re glad [Clinton] has said that she thinks these free trade agreements need to be rethought,” says the AFL-CIO’s Lee. “She’s evolved in the direction where a lot of people are, which is not so much we need to stop trading. It’s that these trade agreements need to hit that sweet spot of balancing the corporate interests and things like labor rights, the environment and all else.”

The Clinton campaign declined comment on the poll.

Zachary Warmbrodt contributed to this report.

The POLITICO Pro-Harvard poll was conducted by independent research company SSRS from Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 among a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.