EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Did Trump's Trade War Impact the 2018 Election?

Emily J. Blanchard, Chad Bown and Davin Chor
Additional contact information
Emily J. Blanchard: Dartmouth College

No WP19-21, Working Paper Series from Peterson Institute for International Economics

Abstract: We uncover evidence that the US-China trade war was consequential for voting outcomes in the 2018 congressional midterm election. Republican House candidates lost support in counties more exposed to tariff retaliation, but saw no appreciable gains in counties that received more direct US tariff protection. The electoral losses were only modestly mitigated by the US agricultural subsidies announced in summer 2018. Republicans also fared worse in counties that had seen recent gains in health insurance coverage (where efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act may have been more consequential), and where a new federal cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions disadvantaged more taxpayers. Counterfactual calculations suggest that Republicans would have lost ten fewer House seats absent the trade war, in a similar range to either health care or SALT policies in the number of lost seats it can account for.

Keywords: Trade War; Trade Policy; Retaliatory Tariffs; Agricultural Subsidies; Health Insurance Coverage; State and Local Taxes; Voting. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias, nep-int, nep-isf and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.piie.com/publications/working-papers/c ... e-industry-financial (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Did Trump’s trade war impact the 2018 election? (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: Did Trump's Trade War Impact the 2018 Election? (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Did Trump's Trade War Impact the 2018 Election? (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: Did Trump's Trade War Impact the 2018 Election? (2019) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iie:wpaper:wp19-21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Peterson Institute for International Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peterson Institute webmaster ().

 
Page updated 2025-02-18
Handle: RePEc:iie:wpaper:wp19-21