Will free(r) trade survive?

Posted on July 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

This presidential election is putting globalization into the crosshairs again.

Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell offered a profound thought: “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

As we ponder the appeal of Donald J. Trump, this insight is worth considering. While he stitches together various discontented groups in his bid to retake the White House, the former president seeks to turn the clock back even further on globalization, among other things. By imposing stiff new tariffs on imports, he maintains that this would restore jobs in hard-pressed Middle American communities.

But would it? Would restricting imports boost the numbers of factory jobs, especially in the states Trump hopes to win? And have similar efforts by President Biden – no friend of globalization himself — paid off for most Americans?

The Tax Foundation, a business-friendly but nonpartisan group in Washington, contends that such tariffs under both Trump and Biden have had a contrary effect – at least for Americans overall. Indeed, it’s not clear that they even helped voters in hollowed out manufacturing communities.

The foundation estimates that if imposed, Trump’s proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent. The group finds that the levies would slash employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs. And that’s all before counting the effects of retaliation in this potential escalation of an ongoing trade war.

As president, Trump imposed nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products valued at approximately $380 billion in 2018 and 2019, the group calculated. This amounted to one of the largest tax increases in decades.

And things actually worsened under Biden. That’s because the Biden administration kept most of the Trump administration tariffs in place, and in May 2024, announced tariff hikes on an additional $18 billion of Chinese goods. The cost amounted to an additional tax increase of $3.6 billion.

“We estimate the Trump-Biden tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by 0.2 percent, the capital stock by 0.1 percent, and employment by 142,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” the foundation says.

But have the levies benefitted folks in protected industries? Have they kept open factories in the industrial Midwest that otherwise would shut down? Is the tradeoff worthwhile?

As WABC-TV broadcaster Warner Wolf used to say, let’s go to the videotape, (well to the stats, anyway):

The number of manufacturing jobs climbed during Trump’s tenure, rising from 12.383 million in January 2016 to a high of 12.828 million in January 2019, before slipping a bit (perhaps seasonally). This suggests that his policies (perhaps) helped add a relatively small 445,000 such jobs. Thanks largely to Covid, the tally dropped to 12.188 million by January 2021, the beginning of Biden’s term, but then climbed to a high of 12.966 million by this past January before slipping back to a preliminary estimate of 12.950 million by June.

The figures suggest that Biden’s policies (perhaps) helped restore more manufacturing jobs – as few as 122,000, if one counts from the Trump-term height, or as many as 760,000, if one counts from the Covid-dampened figure in 2021.

But do tariffs deserve the credit for gains in either administration? Not according to economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As The New York Times reported, a nonpartisan working paper by four such researchers examined monthly data on U.S. employment by industry. Their finding: tariffs that Trump placed on foreign metals, washing machines and an array of goods from China starting in 2018 neither raised nor lowered the overall number of jobs in the affected industries.

Worse, those additional costs did hit many Americans, who paid higher prices for such goods, fueling inflation. Moreover, they incited other countries to impose their own retaliatory tariffs on American products, making them more expensive to sell overseas, and the levies had a negative effect on American jobs, the paper finds. As the Times reported, that was particularly true in agriculture: Farmers who exported soybeans, cotton and sorghum to China were hit by Beijing’s decision to raise tariffs on those products to as much as 25 percent.

Trade wars of the sort that Trump launched, that Biden exacerbated, and that Trump promises to accelerate don’t appear to help even the people they are designed to help. And, overall, consumers and workers pay the freight for this, bearing the burden of higher prices for both imports and domestically produced competing products, the academic work suggests.

“Historical evidence and recent studies show that tariffs are taxes that raise prices and reduce available quantities of goods and services for U.S. businesses and consumers, which results in lower income, reduced employment, and lower economic output. For example, the effects of higher steel prices, largely a result of the 2002 Bush steel tariffs, led to a loss of nearly 200,000 jobs in the steel-consuming sector, a loss larger than the total employment in the steel-producing sector at the time,” the Tax Foundation contends.

So, what accounts for the recent rise in jobs in manufacturing? Well, part of that may be normal economic growth. The number of manufacturing jobs had been rising since at least 2014, predating both Trump and Biden. And, under Biden, assorted industrial policies may have helped boost the tallies, irrespective of tariffs.

Researchers at the Center for American Progress point to investment programs that Biden championed. Singling out three, the group, which styles itself as “progressive” but independent, lists the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The measures were aimed at undoing decades of disinvestment in American communities, the group says.

The efforts were designed to rebuild the nation’s physical, digital, and utility infrastructure; retake the global lead in advanced semiconductor manufacturing; speed the nation’s transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and green energy; and create high-quality jobs, the center notes. These three policies combined direct public spending with grants, loans, tax incentives, and other financial assistance for private companies to promote key sectors, especially manufacturing, using public investment as a way to “crowd in” private investment.

To be sure, there can be little doubt that globalization in recent decades cost some people dearly, even as it benefitted most Americans. While low-cost imported goods helped most consumers, and access to the U.S. market lifted the economies of many other countries, this didn’t help some people – particularly those in industrial states that turned to Trump for relief.

Listen to the liberal Economic Policy Institute: “Globalization of our economy, driven by unfair trade, failed trade and investment deals, and, most importantly, currency manipulation and systematic overvaluation of the U.S. dollar over the past two decades has resulted in growing trade deficits—the U.S. importing more than we export—that have eliminated more than five million U.S. manufacturing jobs and nearly 70,000 factories.”

And consider the disproportionate effect this has had on working-class white voters in the most hard-pressed states – the sort of voters one sees packing into Trump rallies. As The New York Times reported, economic mobility for many of them declined in recent years, even as it improved for many Black Americans.

“Over the past few decades, globalization and changes in technology have caused many jobs to go from the United States to China, India and elsewhere,” the newspaper reported, drawing on a new Harvard study. “These shifts appear to have pushed white people out of the work force, while Black people found other jobs.”

The Times suggests several explanations for the racial disparity.

“White workers might have had more wealth or savings to weather unemployment than their Black counterparts did, but at a cost to their upward mobility,” the newspaper suggests. “They might also have been less willing to find another job. A steel mill that shut down could have employed not just one worker but his father and grandfather, making it a family occupation. People in that situation might feel that they lost something more than a job — and might not settle for any other work.”

Moreover, the Harvard study found that the places where Black workers live were generally less affected by job flight than the places where white workers live. And it noted that, compared with earlier generations, Black workers today are less likely to face racial prejudice in the labor force, making it easier for them to find work. Certainly, this could only fuel the racist demagoguery so rampant nowadays.

As for globalization, even as it has brought big advantages to most Americans — and to many folks overseas — more open trade has been under assault worldwide for years. It was a tough slog for free-trade warrior Clayton Yeutter and President Ronald Reagan to open the way to freer trade back in the 1980s, and many have sought to retrench since. Indeed, the Republican party under the economic nationalist Trump has rejected the concept almost altogether, while Democrats have been only slightly less disapproving.

It’s not clear what a President Kamala Harris would do in this regard. The Tax Foundation, of course, has an idea for what she should do: “In the context of the ongoing trade war, the rise of digital services taxes, and the global minimum tax, U.S. policymakers should seek to build consensus through multilateral negotiations and the rules-based trade system rather than pursue harmful, tit-for-tat retaliation that threatens to compound the harms to U.S. businesses and consumers.”

For his part, Trump has been clear on his route, and it’s not what the foundation would prefer: As the foundation notes, he has proposed a new 10 percent universal tariff on all imports and a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China, as well as potentially higher tariffs on EVs from China or across the board.

As they battle for votes, particularly in key industrial states, Harris and Trump could easily race to the bottom in attacking world trade. The vote in states that they both need — Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, for instance — may turn on the issue. Unlike Trump, however, Harris has some training in economics — it was one of her majors at Howard University as an undergraduate — and her father is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University. She should know better.

Will either candidate “disregard the first lesson of economics” and indulge in pandering on the point? Will Harris’s greater degree of economic sophistication keep that impulse in check? Their stances will bear watching.

The gloves are off

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Joe Weber

If Trump’s edge has been plain speaking, he’s about to meet his match

Some of my relatives in New Jersey have liked one thing above all about Donald J. Trump. As one put it, “he talks like us.” The meaning: unlike politicians whose insults are measured and almost diplomatic, whose criticisms on sensitive topics are muted, the blunt New Yorker “tells it like it is.”

Unburdened even by basic manners, the former president is given to fixing labels on opponents such as “lightweight,” “dumb” or “dummy,” “a dope” or “dopey,” “weak,” “a loser,” “boring” and so on. Like a grade school bully, he bandies about terms such as “Crooked Hillary,” “Crooked Joe,” “Pencil Neck,” “Birdbrain” and “Little Marco.”

Well, Trump may meet his match in Kamala Harris. Addressing her campaign staff, the vice president said that, as a longtime prosecutor, she dealt with perpetrators of all sorts: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Diplomatic? Hardly. Blunt to a fault or coarse? Well, no. Harris is too smart and too — well, adult — for that. On point, though? Unquestionably.

To be sure, Harris’s prosecutor-versus-predator theme isn’t exactly new. She indirectly called Trump a “predator” in the 2020 campaign in her comments in the virtual Democratic National Convention. But, with his 34 felony convictions since then, along with a fraud judgment of $454 million against him and the $88.3 million in a pair of judgments against him for his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, her barbs underscoring Trump’s venality hit home much harder now.

Harris won’t have to sink to Trump’s schoolyard level. Don’t look for her to call him “Dumb as a Rock,” as he, flailing for a label, said of her. Of course, she could do so, with ample evidence: a former prof of Trump’s at Wharton reportedly said of him: “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!” and his former White House colleagues have called him an “idiot,” “dope” and “moron.”

But she won’t hold back, either. It’s clear that the gloves are off in this race and Harris and her compadres won’t be anywhere near as politic as former President Biden has been in dealing with Trump and his vice presidential hopeful, JD Vance. Already, potential Democratic vice presidential nominee Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has called Vance “a phony.”

And just how this all plays out will be fascinating to watch. Despite the relative genteelness of most recent presidential races, strong language has a long history in American political campaigns. A promoter of Thomas Jefferson, for instance, in 1800 referred to the nation’s second president, John Adams, as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” And in 1828, supporters of Andrew Jackson called John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, “a pimp,” accusing him of providing women to the Russian czar while serving as the U.S. minister to Russia. For their part, Adams’s supporters caricatured Jackson’s mother as a prostitute.

Nikki Haley, source; Getty Images via CNN

In today’s take-no-prisoners contest, the more Harris and her colleagues provoke Trump, the more he may be tempted to respond like the thin-skinned brute he is. As The New York Times has suggested, the attacks could provoke him to drop even lower, particularly because women, Blacks and other minorities seem to especially infuriate him. Recall that “Birdbrain” was his term for Nikki Haley, “Pocahontas” was his moniker for Elizabeth Warren, and “Crazy Nancy” was Nancy Pelosi. Trump used the less elegant “that bitch” for former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Certainly, obvious racism and sexism — if Trump and his backers descend into them — will play well with some of the former president’s supporters, perhaps even with many. Indeed, we already are hearing strains of both in comments such as that of Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, who called Harris a “DEI vice president” and “a DEI hire,” invoking the common right-wing attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at universities. Another Republican, Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, said the Democratic Party backed Harris only “because of her ethnic background,” while one right-wing commentator claimed she is not a natural-born citizen because her parents were immigrants (she was born in Oakland, Calif.).

The theme of such critics will be that Harris got where she is as a kind of affirmative action baby. Never mind that Harris is the gifted daughter of an economics professor and a cancer researcher, and that she earned a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. They will ignore the fact that she served as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office from 1990 to 1998, that she was elected in 2004 as district attorney of San Francisco, that in 2010 she was elected as California’s attorney general and then, in 2016, was elected as a U.S. Senator from California. They will play down her work on the Senate’s judiciary and intelligence committees, on which she sat until Biden tapped her to join him in the 2020 race.

Even as he seems increasingly addled by age, Trump may be too clever – or too well-advised – to be flagrantly racist and sexist in his dealings with Harris. While others may be more cloddish, Trump knows just how to stop short of being fully outrageous, how to avoid being too explicit.

Charlottesville, 2017; source: AP, via NPR

Recall that Trump saw “some very fine people on both sides,” among the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017. Remember that in 2020 he told a far-right extremist group to “stand back and stand by.” Recall that he urged on insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021, telling them to “show strength” in the march on the Capitol, after telling them to “be there, will be wild!” And remember that Trump pressed Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes” to try to overturn his loss in the state in 2020.

But, if Harris gets under his skin, Trump could well go too far. How will mainstream voters – particularly women – respond then? How will they react to dog whistles about race and gender? How will they react to more explicit assaults on those grounds by Trump devotees?

Harris is brilliantly positioned to take advantage of such attacks. And she is well-seated to launch far more precise – and well-founded – volleys at Trump. His flaws are legion and we can expect that she will expose, dissect and pound away at all of them.

Indeed, as my relatives may find, Harris will “talk like us” as she shines a bright, bold light on Trump’s foulness. But she may do so far more sharply — and effectively — than Trump ever could.

Is decency returning to our politics?

Posted on May 31, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump’s conviction may herald a swing back to morality

In mid-1954 the chief counsel of the U.S. Army, Joseph N. Welch, asked two questions that triggered the end of the paranoid, conspiracist-dominated era of McCarthyism. With those queries, both Washington and America generally began a slow road back to respect for law, due process and simple reasonableness. “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch asked Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Now, with the conviction of Donald J. Trump as a felon in his tawdry case involving a porn star, a Playboy model, dishonest lawyers and accountants and infidelity, one might ask: “Is America again beginning a return to decency?” Is it possible that, in time perhaps, we will get back to a point where longstanding American virtues can prevail in our civic lives, where our leaders can be moral and fundamentally decent? Does the return begin with the careful judgments applied first by a state grand jury that indicted Trump and then by 12 trial jurors, one of whom spoke favorably of him before the trial? She, along with the others, apparently was persuaded about his perfidy by the mountain of evidence she saw.

Roy Cohn and Trump, 1983, source: Vanity Fair

With its attack on the Washington establishment for a fabricated infiltration by Communists, McCarthyism preceded Trump’s assaults on the “deep state.” It is not accidental that the period saw the rise of Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel – the same oft-disciplined Roy Cohn who taught Trump how to play the legal and PR games that helped him survive financial disasters and rise to the presidency. As a writer for Politico put it, “Trump was Cohn’s most insatiable student and beneficiary.” His techniques included refusing to apologize and never backing down, but instead sticking by lies even as they are debunked, counting on a gullible public to buy them.

Indeed, whether out of calculation, willful blindness or narcissistic self-delusion, Trump continued such deceit in a press conference Friday. He insisted, for instance, that the case was orchestrated by President Biden, though, in fact, it was a state case, not one involving the federal Department of Justice or the president, as a CNN fact-checker noted. Trump argued that the judge barred his lawyers from calling an elections expert, when, in fact, the judge would have permitted the man to testify, though he limited the scope of questioning to issues in the case, so the defense withdrew him. And Trump claimed that the prosecutors were bringing his case, while not dealing with crime that is occurring at levels never before seen in New York (something statistics show is false, with the early 1990s a far more deadly time in the city).

Of course, Trump is given to wild overstatement (a charitable term for it), as he again showcased. He said that his witnesses were “literally crucified” by Judge Juan Merchan, a man he said who “looks like an angel but he’s really a devil.” No crucifixions, literal or otherwise, were reported.

As Trump again derided the trial as “rigged,” he drew the first public rebuke on the case from Biden. The president asserted that the “American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed.” Speaking from the White House, Biden said: “It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, it’s irresponsible, for anyone to say this was ‘rigged,’ just because they don’t like the verdict.”

“Our justice system has endured for nearly 250 years, and it literally is the cornerstone of America,” Biden added, as reported by The New York Times. “Our justice system. The justice system should be respected. And we should never allow anyone to tear it down. It’s as simple as that. That’s America. That’s who we are, and that’s who we’ll always be, God willing.”

America’s justice and political systems haven’t always been respectable, of course. They have been subject to cycles, moving in Hegelian lurches from nuttiness to comparative sanity. The move in the 1950s from the darkness of McCarthyism to a sunnier Eisenhower/Kennedy era marked one such turn, for example. That shift required courageous people who stood up to fear mongering and dishonesty.

Someday we may look back on the New York prosecutors and the jurors as similarly gutsy people, folks who separated the facts from the BS. Depending on how the election goes, we may see those dozen men and women as ordinary citizens who turned the wheel of history.

We have a long way to go first, of course. The sort of rot that McCarthy brought into parts of the GOP in the 1950s has resurfaced to dominate the Republican party today. An opportunistically paranoid view of reality, as so eloquently described by Richard Hofstadter, now reigns in the party that Trump seems to own. It never really went away there, of course (recall Barry Goldwater, the John Birch Society and Richard Nixon), but it was suppressed by such leaders as Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush – men of basic decency and morals, even if one disagreed with them.

As it has driven out reasonable people, today’s party of Trump has come to lack respect for morality and shun decency. His lapdogs, such as VP-hopefuls South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, along with House Speaker Mike Johnson and No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise, wasted no time in rising to Trump’s defense. Such prominent figures in the self-described party of law-and-order dissed the judicial system, managing to be simultaneously hypocritical and cynical – a far cry from the Republican leaders who persuaded Nixon to quit in 1974.

To his credit, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is running for the Senate, seemed like a lone voice on the right. Ahead of the verdict, he urged the public to “respect the verdict and the legal process.” “At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders — regardless of party — must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship,” Hogan posted on X. “We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”

But the Trumpy response came swiftly, echoing the sort of cancellation that Trump delivers to GOP officials who cross him. “You just ended your campaign,” said Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump advisor, on X. (As it happens, Hogan could turn the Senate red if he wins, so LaCivita may have helped undermine that GOP effort).

Unless something momentous happens, we will witness the spectacle of a convict becoming the presidential nominee of his party in mid-July, only days after his scheduled July 11 sentencing. Even felons can run for office and take the job if they win. Of course, in Cohn-inspired style Trump will appeal, something that will drag out the process well into the next presidential term. Trump, who knows how to play the legal system like a fiddle, could even win a reversal (if his apologists at The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere are right about the legal questions the case raises).

All along, Trump will do what he does best – stay in the news, oozing or muscling his way past President Biden in the headlines. He is a master of attention-getting stunts as shown by his vice-presidential sweepstakes, which has kept him in the public eye for months. He will stay in the limelight, overshadowing the real achievements Biden can point to from his time in office.

If issues come into the race, Trump will use them in his manipulative fashion to generate rage. In the din, it could be hard for Biden to remind voters, for instance, that Trump in February sank a promising bipartisan effort to fix the southern border, a bit of naked demagoguery designed to give the GOP an issue to run on. And Trump will hammer away at inflation, ignoring its decline and counting on voters’ ignorance that it’s the independent Federal Reserve that operates the levers on inflation through interest rates.

Certainly, as a product of a normal political culture, Biden would like to run on the issues. Indeed, while Trump courted the press as he played the victim in his pathetic legal melodrama, Biden was on the job as president, endorsing a plan to help resolve the Gaza war. Such diplomatic efforts seem far more newsworthy.

Until this conviction, in fact, Biden has been loath to speak about Trump’s many legal woes and it remains unclear just how hard the president will hit his rival over them, going forward. Will Biden make much of the twice-impeached Trump’s remarkable legal woes in their June 27 debate? Certainly, Biden is all too aware that the conviction is not a knockout punch for the GOP contender and that only voters can deliver that in November. Indeed, Trump and his minions already are trying to turn the conviction to their advantage with supporters, raising funds by playing the persecuted outsider-victim role that resounds with his die-hard backers.

Stormy Daniels, Trump, Karen McDougal; source: Getty Images, via syracuse.com

There’s no question that Trump has upended our electoral system and much of our culture, politically and otherwise. It wasn’t so long ago that voters would shun a potential candidate for being divorced (Reagan broke that barrier). Now many would tolerate a philanderer who cheats on his third wife while she is pregnant and pays hush money to suppress information about his infidelities. Also, despite widespread evidence to the contrary, Trump has managed to cast doubt on the integrity of elections (as he would certainly do again if he loses in the fall). Not incidentally, he has managed to drive suspicions about science and institutions.

But perhaps focusing on the conviction is taking a too-narrow view, as is dwelling on polls that show a close presidential contest. It’s possible that the national return to decency began in 2020, with Biden’s defeat of Trump, or in 2022, when the GOP lost the Senate and many Trump-backed candidates in competitive areas lost races up and down the political ladder. If there is, indeed, a return to decency in our political culture, history will have to fix the turning point. While, the climb back appears likely to remain uphill for a while, Trump’s new description as a felon surely helps.

A Spoiler Alert

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Joe Weber

Could a real third-party candidate mean a Trump victory?

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce – or so goes the saying attributed to Karl Marx. This year we may see a sorry mixture of both, if a credible third-party candidate arises to threaten to do what one arguably did 32 years ago, that is to unseat an unpopular incumbent president.

A friend, a committed Republican of the old-school sort, wrote me recently to say she has become an elected officer of the No Labels party in Maryland. “No Labels is likely to put forth a Unity presidential ticket that will work to deliver commonsense solutions to this country’s many problems,” she wrote. “It is my hope that we can all commit to working together for the greater good, while celebrating the differences that enrich us all.”

What is troubling is that if No Labels launches a serious contender and gains traction, he or she may do what H. Ross Perot did in 1992. The billionaire outsider’s third-party candidacy garnered just under 19% of the popular vote back then, the largest share of the vote for a third-party contender since an election in 1912. While Perot didn’t grab a single Electoral College vote, he served as the spoiler who helped to oust President George H.W. Bush and install William J. Clinton in the White House.

“Dissatisfied voters of all stripes flocked to his call, creating one of the most powerful third-party movements in American history,” wrote Prof. Russell L. Riley of the UVA Miller Center. “Although Perot drew support from both Republicans and Democrats, he probably hurt Bush disproportionately more than Clinton, owing to his harsh attacks against the incumbent and the timing of both his departure and re-entry into the 1992 campaign.”

Joe Lieberman considers Haley, Source: AP

Could this happen again? Could President Biden be unhorsed by Donald J. Trump thanks to a third-party spoiler? Well, No Labels has gained access to the ballot in at least 13 states so far and is aiming for all 50. It doesn’t have a presidential candidate yet, but depending on how things go in the GOP primaries in coming months, it could land someone such as former South Carolina Gov. and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley to lead its ticket. Founding party chairman Joseph Lieberman said that she “would deserve serious consideration.”

While a campaign spokeswoman, responding to Lieberman’s mid-January comment, said Haley had no interest in No Labels, that was before her loss to Trump in New Hampshire. If she loses in her native South Carolina, as expected, on Feb. 24, her view could change, of course.

Haley has polled ahead of Biden in head-to-head matchups. In a recent Quinnipiac poll, for instance, the former governor tops the president by 47% to 42% in a two-person contest. By contrast, Biden tops Trump in a two-way race, 50% to 44%, making one wonder why a GOP in its right mind would stick with Trump instead of Haley. (Of course, the operative phrase in regard to the MAGA-dominated party is “in its right mind.”)

When one tosses in other independent candidates (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein), the results get murkier, according to Quinnipiac. Haley drops to 29%, but Biden also drops, to 36%. Of course, it’s not clear how many votes Haley might siphon off of Biden (or Trump) if she ran with No Labels in a three-way race, but Democrats fear she would do more damage to their man. As the Wall Street Journal reported in analyzing a couple polls last fall, “When voters are given options beyond Biden and Trump, the president tends to bleed the most support …”

Let’s look back to 1992 for some guidance, though. The erratic Perot quit the race in July 1992, but re-entered in October. That gave him just enough time to take part in three debates, where he impressed some voters with his phrase “giant sucking sound,” describing a feared loss of jobs to Mexico if the NAFTA treaty went into effect. At the end of the debates, his chances seemed so good that we at BusinessWeek had to prepare three cover stories in advance of election day, so we’d be ready for anything.

In the end, Clinton won, of course. But he took office with the support of substantially less than half the electorate, collecting just 43% of the vote to Bush’s 37.4% and Perot’s 18.9%. Clinton prevailed because he won in the states where it mattered, swamping Bush in the Electoral College vote – with 370 to Bush’s 168. The president carried only 18 conservative states, including Texas and Florida, both rich in Electoral College votes, but Perot gave them both a run for their money in a couple states, finishing second in Maine (which Clinton won) and Utah (which was Bush country).

Ironically, my friend now helping the No Labels group served in the Bush Administration that Clinton tossed out. She saw first-hand the scorching effect a third-party candidacy can have. As I described in a biography of the late Clayton Yeutter, who was a top adviser to Bush, despondency was widespread in the Bush ranks in mid-1992 and things didn’t get much better as Election Day neared. The president’s approval rating, according to Gallup, dipped to 29% that July and rebounded, but only to 34% soon before he lost the election.

As things stand today, Biden is in better shape than Bush was, but not by much (the Quinnipiac poll, notwithstanding). One can only imagine the depression afflicting his camp. Biden’s approval rating now stands at a disappointing 41%, according to Gallup, though it dropped to 37% last April, October and November. The numbers are reminiscent of those logged by one-term Jimmy Carter, who averaged a 37.4% approval rating in his third presidential year (Biden’s third-year average approval rating is just 39.8%).

Many things can happen between now and November, of course. No Labels, in fact, may not find a credible candidate, especially if Haley demurs or (as seems unlikely) wins enough primaries to be a viable GOP contender. Would Sen. Joe Manchin be a potent contender for the group? Also, Trump may finally be nailed on any number of criminal charges, which likely would erode his support outside of the MAGA diehards (and could force the GOP to seek an alternative). Trump could even be ruled off the ballot in some states, though his appointees to the Supreme Court would shock the world with such a decision.

One thing seems pretty certain, though: a successful third-party candidacy would be a pipe dream. While many Americans don’t like the idea of a Biden-Trump rerun, history suggests that a real third alternative would likely not get very far – but, troublingly, perhaps far enough to make for a repeat of 1992.

The Big Picture

Tag Archives: Donald J. Trump

Will free(r) trade survive?

This presidential election is putting globalization into the crosshairs again.

The gloves are off

Is decency returning to our politics?

A Spoiler Alert