The Hill News

Much campaign commentary has focused on the “horse race.” After Tuesday many will seek portents of the 2012 presidential race in the 2010 results. Yet politics is about governing as well as elections, so it is worth exploring the policy consequences of the midterm election. Given the polarization of the parties, predictions of gridlock abound. A key question will be what, if any, common ground Obama can find with the likely GOP majority in at least the House.

One area of potential cooperation is trade policy. Obama, like all presidents since FDR, favors reducing trade barriers between the U.S. and other countries. Yet while modern chief executives of both parties have favored freer trade, in Congress votes on trade often polarize along party lines. Democrats were once the pro-trade party and Republicans the protectionists, but since the 1970s GOP legislators have been more supportive of trade liberalization than Democrats. The parties’ role-reversal on th! e Hill stems from changes in the preferences of key party constituencies: labor unions that supported trade in the early postwar era felt increasingly threatened by imports while the business community became more multinational in orientation.

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